It’s been a fast clip of a week in Israel. Although it was already clear a week ago that Prime Minister Olmert’s days were numbered, it was uncertain when or how the ax would fall.

Would Mr. Olmert resign or suspend himself from office of his own volition? Be brought down by a revolt within his Kadima party? Lose his coalition in the Knesset and be forced to agree to new elections? And if the latter, when would these elections take place?

A week later, the picture has clarified. There will be elections in the autumn, most probably in November. Mr. Olmert will not run in them and Kadima will have another leader, most likely Foreign Minister Livni, who will be chosen in a primary vote this summer to run against the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak and the Likud Party’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

Whether Mr. Olmert resigns immediately in favor of this vote’s winner, or stays in office until election day, will probably depend on whether a criminal indictment is served against him or the charges of corruption that have brought about his downfall remain in the realm of moral turpitude.

In either case, this would mean that Israel and America will both be holding elections in the same month, with America’s scheduled for November 6 and Israel’s to be determined by the Knesset. The only time I can remember this happening in the past was in 1988, when Yitzhak Shamir edged out Shimon Peres on November 2 and George Bush Sr. beat Michael Dukakis on November 8.

Despite the unique nature of the America-Israel relationship, it is unlikely that any American voter in 1988 was influenced by what happened six days earlier in Israel. But if this autumn America’s elections come first, it is conceivable that some of Israel’s voters will be influenced by them. The question is how.

Suppose, for instance, that the winner on November 6 is Barack Obama. Will Israel’s citizens then tend more to vote for Ms. Livni or Mr. Barak, knowing that, being less hard-line on the substance of a peace settlement with the Palestinians and the Syrians, they will get along better with a Democratic president who has made his preference for negotiation over confrontation clear? Or will some of them, rather, swing to Mr. Netanyahu in the belief that a tough prime minister of Israel is needed to stand up to an American president who may put pressure on Israel to make the kinds of concessions that President Bush never asked it to make?

The last time a Democrat was in the White House, Bill Clinton and his Middle East negotiating aides had poor relations with Mr. Netanyahu when he was Israel’s prime minister between 1996 and 1998. In part, Mr. Netanyahu simply rubbed them the wrong way personally. More consequentially, though, they found him unyielding on issues that — so they exasperatedly felt — could have been resolved with more a bit more give on Israel’s side.

Mr. Obama, who does not appear to have Mr. Clinton’s viscerally warm feelings toward Israel, is likely to find Mr. Netanyahu even more frustrating. What difference, if any, will this make to Israel’s voters?

Should John McCain win the presidency, on the other hand, all this would be reversed. Perhaps Israel’s citizens, feeling confident that Mr. McCain will not seek to twist Israel’s arm, would be likely to vote for more flexible leaders of their own.

Or perhaps, in the belief that President McCain and Prime Minister Netanyahu would have a better relationship than Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama, they would feel freer to cast their ballots for the Likud Party.

It is on the issue of Iran, however, that the question of who is in the White House could be most momentous for Israel’s voters. Here, after all, is where the difference between an Obama and a McCain presidency might be most dramatic. Mr. McCain has repeatedly declared that, as president, he would not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons — and as a former Air Force pilot who has supported the war in Iraq and is in favor of a strong American military posture, he might order an air strike against Iran if all other efforts to keep it from going nuclear were to fail. From everything that we know about Mr. Obama, there is close to zero possibility of this happening with him in office.

Yet here, too, it is far from obvious how this would affect the decisions of Israel’s citizens. Of the three prime minister candidates, Mr. Netanyahu most likely would be to risk Israel’s hitting Iran on its own if it were clear that America had no intention of doing so, with all the grave consequences — including a rift with Washington — that this might entail. Is this a consideration that would move more citizens of Israel to vote for him or against him were Mr. Obama to win on November 6?

And again: If Mr. McCain wins, are there citizens of Israel who would then vote for Ms. Livni, the least likely leader of Israel to attack Iran unilaterally, in the belief that Mr. McCain could be counted on to act in Israel’s behalf?

Unless such questions are asked by professional pollsters, we will not know the answers to any of them. Quite possibly, the answers would show that the effect of America’s elections on Israel’s would be negligible and would change the minds of few citizens of Israel.

What polls are not needed to show is that no persons outside of America will be following the American election campaign more intently than the citizens of Israel. It could hardly be otherwise, for no other people will be more affected by its outcome.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.