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In the run-up to the general election in March, the mutiny in Olmert’s household was a gift to opponents, who accused the future guardian of Israel’s safety of harbouring a brood of peaceniks. “There is a complex dialogue between my children and me,” he responded.

“There are a lot of disagreements and anger, but they have influenced me and I am proud of it. I would like to believe that I have also influenced them.”

He was born in 1945 near Binyamina in the final years of British rule in Palestine. His father Mordechai, a pioneer of Israel’s land settlement, grew up in the Chinese city of Harbin, where Olmert’s grandfather had settled after fleeing Russia after the first world war. "When he died at the age of 88, he spoke his last words in Chinese,” Olmert recalled.

Like his parents, Olmert was an ideological child of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Alliance of Revisionist Zionists and the Irgun militia, intent on establishing the Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. The teenage Olmert was a member of Beitar, a militaristic youth movement, and saw his parents discriminated against for their support of Herut, the party that eventually became Likud.

Injured while serving in the Israeli Defence Forces as a combat infantry officer, he completed his military service as a journalist on the force’s magazine BaMahane. This demeaning soft option had an unforeseen benefit: during the Yom Kippur war he joined General Sharon’s headquarters as a military correspondent. The connection was to pay huge dividends.

With a law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Olmert opened a successful law partnership in Jerusalem, providing the springboard for his election in 1973 as the youngest member of the Knesset, aged 28. He was impetuous and wrong, he admitted, in opposing withdrawal from land in Sinai captured in the Six Day war and voting against the Camp David peace accords in 1978.

As a rising — but colourless — politician, he was given several portfolios, including health, communications and finance, eventually becoming deputy prime minister in 2003. As Sharon’s right-hand man he was a useful sounding board. Deputising for a Sharon stricken with flu, he was the first to float the idea of unilateral disengagement from Palestinian land.

Withdrawal went against his once hawkish views, but he believed it was the only response to the changing demographics of a growing Palestinian population that might eventually outvote Israelis. “The day that they do that is the day we lose everything,” he said.

Olmert just happened to be in the right place at the right time. When Sharon announced last year that he was leaving Likud to form a new party, Kadima, to implement his unilateral plans, Olmert was one of the first to join him. When Sharon collapsed with a stroke on January 4, Olmert became acting prime minister and then prime minister at the head of a coalition government with Labour on April 14.

Luck continued to run his way. The victory of Hamas, the Islamic militant movement, in the Palestinian elections played into his hands by improving Israel’s standing abroad. It allowed Olmert to proclaim that since he could not negotiate with terrorists, Israel was obliged to continue with his disengagement strategy. That is still his avowed intention, although after his assaults on Gaza and Lebanon all bets are off.

“Do not meet troubles halfway,” a Jewish proverb goes. Olmert has opted to go all the way, setting goals that may prove to be unattainable. If he succeeds he will be a hero. Failure would invite swift censure in a country that judges its leaders by results, not by good intentions.