This is Ehud Barak's honeymoon weekend. He has been elected prime minister of Israel, but he has not yet begun to take up the reins of power. Hezbollah attacks on Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon, right-wing Jews building homes in Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, Palestinian leaders vowing to declare statehood before the end of the year, ultra-Orthodox, anti-democratic politicians celebrating their own huge increase in electoral support - none of these are his responsibility, none the product of his actions or policies.

So Mr Barak would be wise to make the most of this last weekend of non-accountability. As of next week, all of Israel's many burdens will rest upon his shoulders.

As of next week, he will be entering negotiations with some of the 15 parties his divided country-folk have seen fit to elect to the Knesset, trying to forge a government stable and like-minded enough to make peace with the Palestinians and the Syrians and the Lebanese, yet wide enough to afford proper representation for those competing, mutually hostile sectors of his public.

As of next week, the Palestinians will be pressing him to address their demands for statehood, the Syrians will be calling on him to relinquish the Golan Heights, Israeli soldiers' mothers will be reminding him of his pre-election pledge to bring their boys home within the year.

As of next week, it will be his job to strengthen Israeli democracy - undermined these past three years by sustained attacks on the police and the court system, led by rabbis, racist Russian politicians and members of Benjamin Netanyahu's own government, and tacitly endorsed by the unlamented outgoing prime minister himself.

And, simultaneously, it will be his job to alleviate the sense of discrimination, hopelessness and alienation that moved more than 400,000 working-class Israelis of North African origin to vote for Shas, the leading ultraOrthodox party, a movement for which democracy is no priority, whose own leader is about to go to jail for bribe-taking, a force now so powerful as to be overwhelming Mr Netanyahu's defeated Likud and threatening to establish itself as Israel's most dominant political power.

As of next week, this will be Ehud Barak's Israel, and its problems will be Ehud Barak's to solve. Small wonder that last Tuesday morning, the day after his election victory, he stopped off at the Western Wall to pray.

To Israel's immense good fortune, Mr Barak's overwhelming 56 to 44 per cent victory over Mr Netanyahu last Monday could well turn out to be a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man.

For months before campaigning started, and especially in the critical three-week runup to polling day, Mr Netanyahu and his campaign chiefs attempted, via their party political advertisements on TV, to sustain an assault on Mr Barak's character, his record and his views. They failed miserably, in turn, to portray him as having been a negligent, selfish chief-of-staff (in his previous military career), as being untrustworthy and as ready to sell out Israel to the Arabs.

In complete contrast to Mr Netanyahu, it seems, Mr Barak is honest, straight-talking, cool under pressure, a loyal family man with a supportive, intelligent wife, coming into office with a clear idea of what he wants to achieve.

These past few days as prime minister-elect, he has demonstrated a commitment to unity and consensus-building that suggests he has learned the lessons not only of Mr Netanyahu's failed administration, but also of the failures of his own mentor, the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin.

Unlike Mr Netanyahu, who spent the past three years attempting to score points off the media, academics, judges and other "elitist" sectors that he knew despised him, Mr Barak seems disinclined to incite against his opponents, disinclined to try to rule through division.

Unlike Mr Rabin, an old soldier who expected all dissenters to fall into line behind him, and met his death at the hands of one who didn't, Mr Barak appears determined to win over those Israelis who oppose him, to reach out to them, to explain the basis and logic of his policies. "I will be the prime minister of all of Israel," he has promised several times this week. "We are all brothers."

Mr Netanyahu said much the same thing on his election three years ago, of course. But he gave no hint of ever meaning it. Mr Barak is already providing evidence - that visit to the Wall was as clear a symbol of partnership with Orthodox Israel as his subsequent visit to Mr Rabin's grave was an embrace of the secular left wing.

But a clean personal record and a desire to bring an end to Israel's external and internal wars, commendable though these may be, will not in themselves ensure any success for Mr Barak. If he is to prove himself the peacemaker, within and without, he will have to move fast and with unusual wisdom.

First, he will have to set his priorities: is it most urgent to protect Israel's democracy by legislating a constitution, to ease social tensions by allocating huge budgets to education and job creation, to negotiate a permanent peace accord with Yasser Arafat, or to end the Lebanon fighting by forging an Israeli-Syrian-Lebanese peace deal?

Ideally, he would want to address all these issues simultaneously. But the political realities here make that virtually impossible. An example of the Catch 22 he faces: to ensure a safe Knesset majority for any territorial concessions to the Palestinians and/or the Syrians, he will need Shas, which has always favoured the land-for-peace equation, in his coalition.

But in return for support, Shas wants continued control of the Interior Ministry, where access to vast amounts of public funds has helped to sustain the party's growing network of schools and full-time adult Jewish study centres. The Israeli left, represented in the Knesset by the Meretz and Shinui parties, vows that it won't join a coalition with Shas. Because Shas places rabbis above Supreme Court judges in its hierarchy of fealty, the left regards it as a potent threat to the rule of law.

Mr Barak himself has pledged that he'll have nothing to do with Shas either, not so long as its leader, Aryeh Deri, who has resigned from the Knesset following his bribery conviction, continues to pull the party strings.

If Mr Barak consigns Shas to the opposition, however, he'll further alienate Israeli Sephardim, and quite possibly encourage a further growth of Shas in the next elections. He'll also be left with little choice but to invite the Likud - his Labour party's most bitter traditional rival - into the coalition. But many members of the Likud, for all the disarray and loss of direction in their party, will baulk at supporting the dismantling of West Bank settlements - an inevitable consequence of peacemaking with the Palestinians.

Quite a dilemma for the incoming prime minister. And only one of many. In a perfect world, his interviews and speeches make clear, he is ready for dramatic territorial compromise with the Palestinians - going far beyond the 13 per cent West Bank handover that Mr Netanyahu agreed to last October, then froze two months later.

Like Mr Rabin, Mr Barak regards the Palestinian conflict as an issue of security, not religious history, and as such is ready to give the Palestinians control of almost all of the West Bank, abandoning settlers where necessary, partnering Mr Arafat toward statehood, all so long as the peace accords ensure that Palestine cannot militarily threaten Israel.

Similarly, in Mr Rabin's vein, he seems prepared to relinquish the entire Golan Heights to Syria, so long as he gets comprehensive peace in return - normalised relations with Damascus and Beirut, to complement Israel's existing treaties with Cairo and Amman.

BUT while such a readiness for compromise will win him extraordinary international plaudits, his ability to implement far-reaching change will depend on there being sufficient support for his government at home. And although the right-wing, expansionist camp is much reduced by the elections, it has far from disappeared. Most worrying, its extremist element - the sector from which the Hebron mass killer Baruch Goldstein and Rabin killer Yigal Amir emerged - now increasingly marginalised, may become increasingly desperate.

Mr Barak shows every sign of recognising how difficult is the way ahead, but also of possessing the self-belief necessary to negotiate it. He is pledging to establish the widest-possible coalition - but to accept only those parties that support his vision, of respect for the law, tolerance, and pragmatism in peacemaking. He claims to have made no pre-election deals with any parties. And he seems to have absorbed how much authority Israel's electoral system gives him personally. While the Knesset is a mess of small, bickering parties, he is the country's directly elected prime minister, carried to victory with a vast majority, personally empowered.

In an interview this weekend with the Yediot Ahronot daily, Mr Barak described himself as being "a realist" and "a man who wants to make peace", someone who would be "ripped apart" at the thought of having to give up biblical land in the West Bank and yet was prepared "to make the difficult decisions". He intended, he said, to "heal the rifts" and "cement the rule of law".

He quoted from the works of the French Talmudist Rashi, and stressed the importance of Judaism and its historical roots in Israel to the country's "social solidarity". He sounded, in short, like he was trying to be all things to all of his people. An impossible aspiration, of course; and precisely what Israel, so bitterly divided in the Rabin and Netanyahu eras, needs from its new leader.