One of the most common sins is not mentioned on Yom Kippur: the custom of asking forgiveness by beating on the chest of the subject of the apology. The most succinct version of the political form of the custom was provided by Golda Meir, when she said she would never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to kill them. This custom that has floated for decades on rivers of blood also continued after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon started the 10 days of penitence by promising giant steps toward a peace settlement this coming year.

No acts of terror justify Ariel Sharon's deliberate foot-dragging. The Palestinian threat to Israeli lives is the reason to accelerate an arrangement, not to still it with false excuses. After unconditionally leaving Gaza, the prime minister blames the Palestinians for the political freeze because they are not responding to his demands, like, for example, freeing only 20 of those directly involved in attacks, as if holding more prisoners will rebuff the Qassam scandal on Sderot.

The pettiness with the Palestinians is a long story, as long as the talks with them. Only in two cases, Menachem Begin's and Yitzhak Rabin's, did a prime minister know how to depart from the mutual pathology of rejection, and thus the revolutionary Oslo agreement has been nailed into the national memory as an historic failure.

Sharon's achievement this year was when he proved it is possible to overcome the wailing of Israeli self-pity and fortify his self in power even though he played against the political rules of surfing the waves of nays. But anyone who sees him making a breakthrough must take note of the traditional symptom that continues to dictate his behavior. The terror has weakened, the demon Arafat is gone, Sharon is going into the final stretch of his career, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are in distress, a majority of the public wants an agreement, and he continues his old ways and does what Golda did, asking for the wages of Arik.

He managed to cut to a minimum the opposition in the Likud, and the rebels are practically standing in line asking for atonement. From the shadows of Labor there's only the whispery murmurs of efforts to remain in government with him until the elections. This week one of the best in the Knesset, Avraham "Baige" Shochat, left, to be replaced by someone convicted of corruption. In the post-'67 era there has not been a leader aside from Begin at his peak, who could, like Sharon, implement his political vision, if he really had one. Instead of ceasing the abuse of the Palestinian leader and breaking through with momentum to a different national course, he dabbles in dusty slogans.

His envoy is that amusing valet, Dov Weissglas, to whom can be attributed the good jokes that appear in various columnists' writing as coming from the corridors around Sharon. But he's a powerless envoy to Washington and Ramallah, who translates into petty legal terms his sender's stubbornness. Sharon himself has never tried to take personal responsibility such as that taken by his two predecessors for a pioneering effort (one even taken by Ehud Barak on occasion) to forcefully go to the PA with an offer it can't refuse.

Making it easy on Sharon is an American president who is perhaps the most out of step president in a hundred years. While the Prime Minister's Office takes pleasure in Bush's support, the president appears to increasing numbers of his countrymen and even to the uppermost echelons of the neoconservative intelligentsia to be as useful as a broken bat. That's how Sharon can run even the road map plan through American red lights.

The picture is dosed with the colors of disaster. Prof. Yisrael Aumann, like Prof. Daniel Kaheman before him, won a Nobel prize for improving the understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory. It's both funny and sad that a serial conflicter like Israel takes pleasure in the achievement. If its leader goes back to denial and turns his back on his holiday promise, it's enough to know from experience that he'll be marking out the path back to bloodshed. Blessed art Thou, the Lord, the peacemaker, will be said tonight? Not with the old Sharon.