UNTIL HE TOOK OVER CHAIRMANSHIP of the Labor Party two years ago, Ehud Barak, 56, had succeeded spectacularly at practically everything he tried. A Stanford-trained engineer and accomplished pianist who crowned a glittering military career with his appointment as chief of staff, Barak retired from the Israel Defense Forces in 1995 as the most highly decorated officer in its 50-year history. But as opposition leader, Barak has been a dud. He trailed Prime Minister Netanyahu in the polls throughout much of last year. Barak astounded many of his countrymen when he told a television talk-show host that if he had been born a Palestinian he would have joined a ““terror organization at some point.''

The collapse of Netanyahu’s coalition over the holidays put Barak back on top of the opinion surveys. He has hired U.S. political consultants James Carville, Stanley Greenberg and Robert Shrum to map out campaign strategy. Though widely associated with the right wing of his party, Barak will still need all the help he can get to fend off Netanyahu’s charges that he is a closet leftist who will sign off on Palestinian statehood the minute he gets into office. Barak’s campaign probably will focus on attacks against Netanyahu. ““If peace could be achieved through the screen, and terror could be defeated through spin, we have an ideal prime minister,’’ he recently said.

BENNY BEGIN: THE ULTIMATE HARD-LINER

BENNY BEGIN, 55, IS THE DR. NO OF the Middle East peace process. A Knesset member who served as Science minister under Netanyahu, the owlish son of the late prime minister Menachem Begin rejected the Oslo peace accords, quit Netanyahu’s cabinet over the Hebron peace deal and left the Likud bloc over the Wye agreements. Begin is esteemed even by his staunchest political enemies as a paragon of rectitude. But his political views place him at the extreme right wing of the Israeli spectrum, badly out of sync with the majority of Israelis who support the peace process.

Still, the U.S.-educated geologist clearly will take some votes away from the prime minister in the first round. Last week he called Netanyahu’s leadership ““tired, lenient, surrendering’’ and said his own candidacy was the only alternative to a path that leads to a Palestinian state. But initial opinion surveys give Begin no more than 10 percent support nationwide, and some of his strongest backers concede that he stands little chance of beating out Netanyahu among right-wing voters for a spot in the runoff. If nothing else, Begin and his allies want to give Israelis a chance to register their disenchantment with the peace process and the country’s mainstream leaders who have accepted it.

AMNON LIPKIN-SHAHAK THE MILITARY HERO

AMNON LIPKIN-SHAHAK, 54, made a major announcement on Christmas Eve. First, he said he would retire as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces–the country’s top military position. Subsequently he has declared that he will work to unseat the prime minister through the creation of a new, centrist party, though he has stopped short of announcing his own candidacy. ““There will be a new way, and this new way is my way,’’ he told reporters outside a military induction center.

Though he’s not a forceful speaker, the retired general is the man most feared in both the government and Labor camps. He radiates calm, supporters say, in a way the current Labor Party leader doesn’t. A protege of the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Lipkin-Shahak was deeply involved in talks with Palestinian leaders following the 1993 Oslo agreement, and he remains a close friend of Rabin’s family. Netanyahu’s aides consider Lipkin-Shahak formidable partly because he so closely resembles the image their boss projected at the outset of his political career. A political newcomer, Lipkin-Shahak is a telegenic public servant untainted by scandal or failed policies. And Israelis traditionally have embraced former military leaders as political leaders. Lipkin-Shahak twice won Israel’s highest medal for valor following commando raids into Jordan and Lebanon. Strategists from both major parties are betting that a long campaign will erode some of the general’s luster. Mainly for that reason, they scheduled the elections as late as possible.

DAN MERIDOR: AN ISRAELI DUKAKIS?

THINK OF HIM AS THE MICHAEL Dukakis of Israeli politics: a decent, capable and experienced moderate who can’t shake the ““wimp’’ label assigned him by the acerbic Israeli media. Running as a third-party challenger, Meridor, 51, is a Knesset member who served briefly under Netanyahu as Finance minister. Last week, his former boss taunted him with what is bound to become a campaign refrain: Meridor’s ““political positions are flaccid and limp,’’ the prime minister said.

Resentment has festered between the two for years. Meridor, the son of a founding father of the Likud bloc, was one of the second-generation Likud ““princes.’’ They felt upstaged by the U.S.-reared Netanyahu’s swift rise in Likud politics in the early 1990s. ““It’s no secret that Menachem Begin saw [Meridor] as his successor,’’ one parliamentary ally told a crowd in Jerusalem last week as Meridor kicked off his campaign. Meridor, meanwhile, is trying to cast Netanyahu as the outsider, ““a man that came to Israel 10 years ago.’’ After he resigned from Netanyahu’s cabinet in 1997, Meridor told friends he had grown tired of hearing Netanyahu say, often in English, ““We have to control the spin on this.''

Meridor’s prospects for creating a viable new centrist party appear to rest on Lipkin-Shahak’s willingness to give up his own campaign for prime minister. Most election analysts expect exactly the opposite to happen: ever the gentleman pol, Meridor will probably abandon his own quest for the premiership and sign on as the ex-general’s No. 2.