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JERUSALEM — He may be significantly lagging in the polls as Israel's Tuesday election nears, but Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak continues plugging away toward a phantom peace agreement with a doggedness that has supporters and detractors alike pondering his motives.

Beyond his immediate electoral considerations — and it's not clear whether some last-minute partial peace deal would even save him at this point — observers say Barak is driven by a military-style sense of mission and an excessive ambition to stake a place in Israeli history as the leader who pushed peace with the Palestinians as far as he could.

Barak's willingness to make decisions on critical issues despite having a minority government, under the deadline of impending elections, has aroused intense criticism from opponents and even from left-wing academics who raise the specter of abuse of power.

The beleaguered premier, who lives in the Green Line community of Kochav Yair, less than two miles from the Palestinian city of Kalkilya, pledged Tuesday evening to enact a radical plan to separate Israel from the Palestinians if he wins the election.

"Just as we set a limit to Lebanon and had the strength to leave it, and as we set a limit to the recession and had the strength to take the country out of the recession and bring it to a state of growth, we shall also have the strength to take our boys out of Judea and Samaria," he said Tuesday night, sparking condemnation from settlement leaders that Barak's politics are one of division, not unity.

Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein joined the line of prominent Israelis to criticize the premier's actions, firing off a letter to Barak earlier this month questioning the legitimacy of trying to make history during an election period.

Recent opinion polls show Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon has dropped his lead over Barak, from 28 percentage points in early January to the current 22 points. But Barak shrugs off the polls and rejects any suggestion that he step aside at the last minute to allow former Prime Minister Shimon Peres — who stands a better chance against Sharon, according to the polls — to represent Labor.

Pundits increasingly say Barak, who earned his stripes in the military on daring commando raids behind enemy lines, is on a suicide mission. Yet officials close to Barak brush off the attorney general's letter as politically motivated, and reject mounting criticism that he is trying to secure a peace deal simply to improve his chances of re-election.

"If Barak wanted to keep his seat, the easiest thing would be to bring Sharon into the government," said an official from the prime minister's campaign headquarters. "He is guided strictly by Israel's national and security interests, and will bring any agreement to the people before signing."

Ever since Barak resigned in December and triggered a snap election for prime minister, the conventional wisdom has been that his only hope was to secure a historic peace agreement.

But ex-President Clinton's proposals to divide Jerusalem and cede sovereignty over the Temple Mount appeared increasingly unpalatable to Israelis, especially as the ongoing violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip had shaken faith, even on the left, in the possibility of an "end to the conflict" with the Palestinians.

Also unclear were the personal and psychological factors motivating Barak. With a tradition of secrecy and centralization of power gleaned from decades in the army, Barak allowed only a tiny handful of trusted insiders into his counsel.

However, from the analogies he used and allusions to his role models, it appeared Barak dreamed of entering the pantheon of great Israeli leaders — such as former Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin — who were visionary enough to read strategic realities years before their contemporaries, and valiant enough to stay the course despite their detractors.

"He's a very megalomaniacal person, and he really put into his head that he would be the one that signs the final agreement" with the Palestinians, Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev said of Barak.

"That's what led him to make a historic mistake," Segev added. "Rather than continue the Oslo road" of gradual agreements, Barak "put it into his head that he can reach a final settlement and try to impose it on" Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Upon taking office in July 1999, Barak sought to redraw the rules of Middle Eastern diplomacy, dispensing with the extended and leisurely haggling characteristic of the Arab market in favor of strict deadlines that he believed would force Arab leaders to make peace forthwith or expose their intransigence.

Only one deadline — for an Israeli military withdrawal from Lebanon — was kept, and it is seen as one of the few incontrovertible successes of Barak's tenure. Other deadlines, in negotiations with Syria and the Palestinian Authority, proved ephemeral.

A gifted chess player, Barak had laid elaborate and far-sighted plans that contained only one basic flaw in both domestic Israeli politics and his negotiations with the Arab world: a misreading of his adversaries' intentions. Perhaps, some say, by resigning and calling elections within 60 days, Barak sought to force Arafat to cease prevaricating and come to an agreement quickly, rather than face a more stubborn, Likud-led government.

If so, that logic also unraveled, as Arafat waited so long to respond to a late December American peace proposal that he effectively killed it.

"There will be no agreement signed before elections," predicted Yaron Ezrahi, a political science professor at the Hebrew University and the Israel Democracy Institute. "This election will either be a referendum on the outline of a peace agreement or it will be an election on the question of who should lead the country in the wake of the collapse of the peace process."