So far it is unclear who’s winning. But as the Israeli Army continues its multipronged attacks against Palestinian targets–incursions into the West Bank, airstrikes and assassinations of militants–Mofaz has been the point man in a relentless war of attrition. In the process, he has become the darling of Israel’s right-wing Likud bloc and a leading candidate for Defense minister after he retires from the Army next summer. Mofaz personifies the hard-line approach of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who visited Washington last week and got at least tacit support for his policy of striking hard at Palestinian militants and isolating Yasir Arafat. “The more Arafat’s irrelevance is pushed, the faster a new leadership will come,” Sharon said after meeting Bush.

Yet Mofaz has also attracted his share of critics. Some members of Israel’s cabinet accuse him of trying to hijack government policy. And increasing numbers of Israelis are starting to question the tit-for-tat military strikes that have caused hundreds of Palestinian deaths without bringing Israelis security. “Mofaz has forgotten that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved by military means,” moderate commentator Hirsh Goodman wrote in the Jerusalem Report.

Dissent in the Army is also growing. Two weeks ago four reservists circulated an open letter to the Israeli command objecting to service in the Palestinian territories. Duty there has “nothing to do with the security of our country,” they wrote, and has the “sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people.” More than 200 reservists and regular soldiers, including many officers, have now signed the petition–the largest act of protest in the Israeli military since the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Mofaz insists “we are working to ease the lives of the Palestinians” and calls the open letter both unwise and illegal. “At a time when Israel is at war against terror, there is no place for such actions,” he says.

That uncompromising vision, combined with political savvy, has fueled Mofaz’s relentless climb to the top of the military hierarchy. Born in Iran in 1948, he emigrated with his parents to Israel when he was 9 and settled in Elat, then a harsh desert outpost by the Red Sea. Mofaz joined the Army at 18 and decided early on to make it a career. “The Israeli Army offers opportunities I’m not sure you’d have in other institutions,” he says. As a member of the paratroop brigades, he battled the Egyptians in the Negev Desert during the Six Day War, joined a team of commandos in the 1976 hostage rescue at Uganda’s Entebbe airport and led a brigade in the invasion of Lebanon. Three years ago, during the tenure of prime minister Ehud Barak, Mofaz was named chief of staff by the minister of Defense, Yitzhak Mordechai, becoming the first Sephardic Jew ever to hold the post.

Mofaz is a natural ally of Ariel Sharon, according to people who know them well. Both are seasoned warriors with a strong attachment to the land and a belief that the Jews have a historical right to remain in the West Bank, or what they call Judea and Samaria. “Mofaz has a lot of sympathy for the settlers,” says Ronnie Shaked, a military-affairs correspondent for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. “In his view, you can’t defend Israel from its 1967 borders.” Like Sharon, Mofaz also believes that the overnight withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon in 2000 was a blunder that set the stage for the intifada by signaling Israeli weakness. Both men regard Arafat’s proto-state in shades of black and white. “The Palestinian Authority has become a terrorist entity, from its toe to its head,” says Mofaz, citing the 50 tons of weapons apparently ordered by the Authority that was seized in January aboard the ship Karine A. “These terrorists have one goal–to kill more people in the heart of Israel.”

Mofaz’s outspokenness–unusual for a chief of staff–has put him at odds with members of Sharon’s cabinet. Last year the military briefly occupied the Palestinian-controlled hills above the West Bank city of Hebron to stop snipers from firing on the Jewish settlements below. After the cabinet ordered the troops’ withdrawal, Mofaz publicly attacked the decision, saying that the pullout “would make it more difficult to protect Israeli civilians and soldiers.” The settlers praised Mofaz, but Sharon called his statements “unprecedented” interference; Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer threatened to fire him. Mofaz and Ben Eliezer have clashed repeatedly since then. “They despise each other,” says one Israeli military analyst. Last week Mofaz seemed unhappy over the Defense minister’s meeting with Mohamed Dahlan, Arafat’s security chief in Gaza. “Without a change of strategic thinking by the Palestinians, there is no way to sit and negotiate,” he says.

Mofaz believes that the only way to force that change is by breaking the Palestinians’ will to fight. He monitors that effort closely, communicating via a large-screen videophone with fellow generals and climbing into a helicopter every week to visit troops under fire. “You have to be in the field with your soldiers and officers during a time of war,” he says, sitting behind a desk adorned with photographs of his paratrooper son. He has little hope that the uprising will be quelled by summer, when he leaves his post, and little doubt that the only solution rests in pure military might. “We are living in a region with no tolerance for weakness,” he says. “We have to be strong.” It isn’t clear where he draws the line between strength and aggression.