If only Israel’s politicians deployed the same ingenuity and persistence towards their country’s external predicaments as they do towards their own survival. Just when his exit looked imminent, Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister, has bought himself another three months of political life.

His gamble is that investigations into the corruption allegations against him – which he denies – will expose their weaknesses within the next few weeks and boost support for him again. Even so, he may well lose the internal party elections in September, to which he agreed as the price of this deal. He may not even bother to stand.

All the same, even a few months’ continuity is better for the painful attempts to resume negotiations with the Palestinians, and to keep them going until a new US president takes over next year. You couldn’t call it a peace process – not really even a process – but recent contact has at least led to the Gaza ceasefire.

For months Olmert has looked finished. Now, they are calling him Houdini. In a last-minute deal, Ehud Barak, Defence Minister and leader of the opposition Labour party, agreed not to support an opposition vote to dissolve parliament and call immediate general elections. Part of his calculation no doubt was that both Olmert and Barak are trailing Binyamin Netanyahu, the hawkish former Prime Minister, in opinion polls. In return, under this deal, Olmert would hold internal elections in his centrist Kadima party; analysts reckon that, at the moment, he would lose, possibly to Tzipi Livni, the Foreign Minister.

Those are the intricate loops that have secured his escape, this time. But he was also able to claim with more force than several months ago that negotiations with the Palestinians would be jeopardised by his exit. He has taken two steps that have real value: the continuation of talks with Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian President and a leader of the moderate Fatah party, and the arrangement of a ceasefire in Gaza with the Islamist Hamas.

The ceasefire with Hamas has hardly earned Olmert solid support in Israel. Some, inevitably, have criticised him for agreeing to any deal that did not insist on the release of Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier seized two years ago.

Many argue, too, that the ceasefire is meaningless without wider progress in the talks. True, in his efforts to keep his staggering coalition upright, Olmert conceded the building of more settlement houses in the West Bank, despite vocal objections by the US. True, too, Hamas has not moved towards recognising Israel’s right to exist, something Israel has made a condition of direct negotiations.

However, one of the most persuasive points that Tony Blair made to a Commons committee this month was that it was impossible to get anywhere without a ceasefire, because the stand-off brought everyday life to a halt. He argued too that there was a value in simply keeping the contact between both sides going.

Olmert’s fate will depend partly on his lawyers’ abilities in the coming weeks. But he has made a case that three more months of him has value and, in political athleticism, he has earned it.

Times Recommends

• A new kind of western conservatism
• Georgiana is the wrong role model
• Alaska, where cops don't bother you