A few days after her not-quite-oust-Olmert push, Yariv Reicher, a consultant, told me: “I’ll take her as my lawyer or friend, but to lead here you have to have something hard to describe, something Sharon and Begin and Rabin had, something from the innermost person that gives you hope, an answer to your pain. She needs to speak from her guts.”

But it did take guts for Livni to tell her boss he should quit. Rows between Israeli prime ministers and foreign ministers are nothing new: each vies to control the Washington relationship, the one that counts. But Olmert-Livni represents a new level of poison. When Sharon had his crippling stroke last year, both she and Olmert were in position to take over the Kadima leadership. Livni stepped aside — and was rewarded, she feels, with contempt. Livni’s testimony to the Winograd Commission amounts to a portrait of humiliation. Requests for meetings with Olmert at critical moments in the war are refused; she is told to “calm down” when she does see him; she is forced to watch the prime minister chat to the chief of staff as she is talking; and she is long frustrated in her quest for a diplomatic outcome.

“The situation is very sensitive,” she told me when I asked about Olmert during our first meeting, adding that in the end “it is not about me and the prime minister but the crisis in our society.” What she had said “was exactly what I wanted to say, no regrets. I chose the words. I know that people want blood. That’s nice, but. . . .”

Resilience tends to pay in Israeli politics. Netanyahu has bounced back at the head of Likud, and even Ehud Barak, the former prime minister who fell from grace after his peace efforts collapsed, has returned as Labor leader and defense minister. Many saw a rite of passage in Livni’s grilling by the media. Her rise had been too smooth; this painful episode would toughen her. “Of course she will come back,” says Igal Galai, the friend of Sharon’s who watched her emergence. “Right now in Israel, I don’t see anyone better.”

Doubts persist over the future of Kadima, bereft of its creator, Sharon, and beset by corruption. But Livni says that she still believes in the neophyte party. She did not leave Likud to follow Sharon, she insists. She left “because there is a need to promote a peace process” and Likud is a party “whose ideology starts with the word ‘no.’ ” Israelis are questing for new hope. Whether Netanyahu’s Likud or Barak’s Labor can provide that is open to question: both speak of yesterday.

Dita Kohl-Roman has watched her friend’s evolution closely. Livni used to shut off any conversation about becoming prime minister, but the Lebanon war was a turning point. Such crises pose the question, Can you take this — do you want the job enough? “And a few months later we sat in a Tel Aviv coffee shop,” Kohl-Roman told me, “and she said she was ready to run for prime minister and that she had gone through an inner process and was prepared.” She says she believes that to win Livni “must get over her uptightness, go through a process of loosening. And then I hope our society can encompass someone who represents something so good and decent as our leader.”

Livni can rise above her inner constraints. In a speech in 2005 that riveted the nation on the 10th anniversary of Rabin’s death, she declared: “I did not elect or choose Rabin, but he was elected to be the Israeli prime minister, the prime minister of my country. . . . Law, ladies and gentlemen, is not a technical issue. It is the full expression of a precious system. Specifically, in a time when Israel is fighting for its existence, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the aim, the common denominator and the shared values that are all the meaning of the existence of Israel: a national homeland for the Jewish people, a Jewish and democratic state. These two values are connected to each other. This is the thing that connects us with each other.”