The parallels are downright eerie. The Prime Minister, once so popular, is now detested by many of his own erstwhile supporters. While his dejected colleagues plan their succession strategies and openly acknowledge the inevitability of his defeat, he alone continues to insist that victory is possible.
And what has brought him to this low? A combination of his own arrogance and the frustrations of attempting to negotiate with the Palestinian President, Mr Yasser Arafat.
But the big difference between the plight of the then prime minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, on the eve of his election defeat in May 1999, and that of the present Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, on the eve of his dismissal now, is that the former was rejected by his people for offering too little to the Palestinians, while the latter is going to lose power for offering too much.
And to underline the inescapable dilemma that continues to dominate Israeli politics, indeed Israeli conversation, year after year, the man about to replace Mr Barak, the hardliner Gen Ariel Sharon, is going to take his country straight back down the road that the electorate rejected two years ago; replicating Mr Netanyahu's policy of resisting concessions to Mr Arafat.
The prime ministerial elections are on Tuesday, and every opinion poll for the past month has indicated that Gen Sharon is heading for a landslide victory. Yet Mr Barak has refused to stand aside for the more popular moderate candidate, Mr Shimon Peres - the deadline for such a change passed overnight - and insisted yesterday that the campaigning in earnest begins only now.
"I will be elected," he asserted, defying near-universal opinion in much the same way as did Mr Netanyahu in 1999, staring defeat in the face and left with only his wife and a handful of advisers in the final days of his campaign.
Even Mr Barak's last, faint hope of good news on the Palestinian front evaporated yesterday. First, two Israelis and two Palestinians were shot dead in the West Bank.
Then last night Mr Barak's office announced that he would not be meeting Mr Arafat in Europe early next week, as had been rumoured. The idea had been to formulate a joint declaration.
But aides to the two leaders were unable to agree in advance on the text of this joint declaration, and Mr Barak, badly bitten in previous encounters, was understandably loath to set off to meet Mr Arafat with the agenda still open.