Outgoing President George W. Bush, his hard-line lieutenants Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have worked overtime for the past eight years to strengthen hard-line hawks in Israel and to marginalize and discredit more moderate voices.

Backed by their eager neoconservative courtiers, Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney worked hard to prevent current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert from opening the diplomatic dialog with Syria that he wanted to. And they went through little more than the motions - even in the Annapolis peace process - of trying to get any kind of meaningful negotiations going between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

However, Obama's victory and Bush's evident lame duck status are already producing startling changes in the Israeli domestic national security debate. On Tuesday, the respected Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reported that Amos Yadlin, the current head of Israeli military intelligence - long regarded as far more hawkish in its Intel estimates and recommendations than the Mossad general foreign intelligence service - said in the prestigious Moshe Dayan annual memorial lecture Monday that there was only "a low probability" of any calculated attack on Israel by one of its neighbors.

Most remarkable, Yadlin publicly stated that Bush's departure from the White House was being welcomed "with a sigh of relief in the Middle East, with cautious hope for peace."

Yadlin knows Washington and the importance of maintaining a warm relationship with the global hyper-power as well as any senior Israeli official. In the past, he has held the position of Israel Defense Forces military attaché to Washington and he has also run Israel's National Defense College. His high profile comments indicate that the idea of favoring the diplomatic option over a military preemptive strike against Iran is certainly not taboo among senior Israeli military leaders.

There are several conclusions to be drawn from Yadlin's remarkable comments. The first is that the current Israeli government most certainly is not determined to provoke a preemptive air strike on Iran's nuclear installations by the United States, or to attempt such an operation unilaterally.

The second is that Obama will enjoy a brief window of opportunity to try and defuse the Iranian nuclear issue with an Israeli leadership that wants a peaceful resolution if possible, whatever the neocon hawks in Washington have to say about it.

But Obama may have to move quickly, because Olmert may not be replaced by the relatively dovish Livni, but by Likud leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, her main challenger in the coming Israeli elections.

Chances for peace and averting war are not uncommon in the modern Middle East, but tragically, they have too often been missed. Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, his choice for secretary of state, should take this one seriously.