(Ilene R. Prusher-CSmoniter).It was one of those moments in Israeli politics – any nation's politics – in which the numbers just don't add up. Lawmakers had been toiling all night trying to fashion a budget. Now night had turned into dawn and debate into occasional tempestuousness when, at 7 a.m., Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strode into the Knesset in his trademark crisp white shirt, designer tie, and dark suit.
Fourteen years ago, when he was prime minister the first time around, Mr. Netanyahu likely would have marched straight to his desk, crunched his numbers, applied his macroeconomic theories, and come up with his answers to the budget gap. Not this time, according to Yuli Edelstein, his minister of information and diaspora.
Instead, Netanyahu headed for the back of the room where rank-and-file members sat. He shook their hands, asked about their spouses, inquired about their kids.
"I saw him shaking hands with all kinds of backbenchers. I looked at this scene and said with wonder, 'Is this the same person from 17 years ago?' " recalls Mr. Edelstein. "Back then, he was too much of a policy wonk to do anything like that."
The scene illustrates one way in which Netanyahu has changed since his first tenure as prime minister from 1996 to 1999. Although perhaps still someone who prefers the lecturer's podium to backroom politicking, he has learned to excel at the glad-handing art of governance, which was remarkably absent the first time around. "In the beginning it was hard for him to understand that outside the world of big ideas you have to do a lot of political homework, to give recognition to people – to members of Knesset, to coalition partners," Edelstein says.
Now it's about being a little less cerebral, a little more congenial. And, perhaps, taking things in stride. "I see him today being more patient and less jumpy, less overreacting to all kinds of things," says Edelstein. "There are people who are a natural at this. He's not."
Other things, however, seem to come easily: Netanyahu's ability to state his case. Even, that is, when much of the world disagrees, as it has with his stance on the flotilla crisis that erupted May 31. From the time he was a student at Cheltenham High School near Philadelphia, where he excelled on the debating team, to his world debut in the mid-1980s when he began defending Israel as its envoy to the United Nations, Netanyahu showed acumen in the persuasive arts. But it's still not clear where he will put these skills to the greatest use – in swaying fellow Israelis to take risks for peace or in convincing the rest of the world why an embattled Israel can't.
From the floor of the Knesset plenum to the door of the White House, from the halls of power in Europe and the Middle East to – perhaps most important – the Muqata in Ramallah where the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas sits, there seems to be a shared sense of mystery about who Benjamin Netanyahu really is and who he is ready to become.It may be that he wants both. He wants to be Bibi, as he is widely known here, the man who defends Israel from outside pressure to make concessions that might endanger its survival – which is precisely how he has played his opposition to ending Israel's controversial naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. But he also wants to be Bibi, the man who would become Israel's equivalent of Nixon in China – the last man anyone expected to take a risk for peace with the enemy, and perhaps the only one who could do it....
The few people who are close to Netanyahu say they see a man who has evolved and matured. But probably not converted. "Is he entirely changed? Born-again? No, he's not," says one confidant. "People don't change entirely. But there are changes that come with experience. He's trying to do better this time. I think it's possible that he's ready to break through politically, but I'm not sure it's possible, given the limits we see on the Palestinian side."
These different faces of Netanyahu suggest a complex man whom even confidants find difficult to read. His handling this summer of a series of incendiary issues with global implications – the flotilla crisis, the proximity talks with the Palestinians, and the dwindling months left to a freeze in West Bank settlement construction – will test how much he's evolved as a leader and an ideologue, not to mention his relations with Washington. More important, it may define whether he will go down as a statesman or a nationalist.
Netanyahu's focus on protecting an Israel under threat – then from Iraq, now from Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas – has dominated nearly everything he has done in public life. "Every living organism depends on its ability to recognize the threat to its life in time," Netanyahu said last month in a speech to Russian journalists. It's a maxim he quotes often. Of two political portraits on the wall in his office, one is of Winston Churchill, whom Netanyahu admires for his perception of the Nazi threat long before other Allied powers, including the US. (The other photo is of Theodor Herzl, considered the founder of modern Zionism.)
Indeed, fending off foes at home and abroad has long been Netanyahu's forte. In the past, that acumen in assessing threats has sometimes translated into a siege mentality in which Netanyahu was portrayed in the Israeli media as mistrustful and paranoid. (In a 1997 interview with the Monitor, he opened with the words, "OK, shoot to kill.")
It's a theme that replays itself over and over again. Netanyahu has taken the world's questions about the legality and morality of Israel's naval blockade on Gaza and morphed it into an international assault on Israel's right to self-defense and, by default, right to exist. "Today," Netanyahu told an elite army unit he visited on June 8, "Israel's very right to defend itself is under attack."
This March came in like a lion: The visit of US Vice President Joe Biden was derailed by an embarrassing announcement that Israel would build housing for several thousand Jews in East Jerusalem. It did not go out like a lamb. Things worsened when Netanyahu, during a visit with President Obama, got a palpably cold shoulder at the White House.
But the "tough love" – a term many veteran Middle East policymakers in Washington have come to use as a catchphrase for taking a firmer hand toward Israeli ambivalence and foot-dragging – got perhaps too rough and backfired. Members of Congress, and pillars of the American-Jewish community such as Elie Weisel, began to chastise the administration for taking too harsh an approach and alienating Israel...
Other things began looking up for Netanyahu as well. In April, he survived a serious challenge from within his own Likud Party. In May, Israel was accepted to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a major nod toward Netanyahu's economic reforms. Long-sought Israeli-Palestinian proximity talks finally began.
Then, in mid-May, Mr. Obama told members of Congress that he'd made some missteps entering the Middle East minefield and, he joked, might have lost a few fingers. Underscoring Washington's move to mend fences, Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, hand-delivered an invitation for a White House meeting ahead of Obama's parley with Mr. Abbas. Those given to gloating said Bibi had wrestled with the giant and won – or at least had not been cowed. Those given to more diplomatic language said it was a sign of accepting that Netanyahu is here to stay.
"Perhaps there were hopes in Washington at one point of a different government constellation, one that would include the Kadima Party," says Zalman Shoval, a veteran Likud member, former Israeli ambassador to the US, and head of the prime minister's Forum on US-Israel Relations. "They realize now that this is not going to happen. The coalition is very solid, at least at present, and they have to deal with him whether they like it or not. So they decided to warm up the relationship."
But then came the raid. "Man plans, God laughs," holds a famous Yiddish saying, one that Netanyahu's ancestors in Eastern Europe probably knew well. (His ancestry is directly linked with a revered religious sage known as the Vilna Gaon, or genius, of Poland.) Instead of reaping the benefits of victories large and small won over the past few months, Netanyahu now finds himself on the defensive domestically and internationally – and jousting with Washington once again. It's a position he knows and plays well.
"There's a myth that he's nervous under pressure. But I've seen him be very firm," says Dr. Gold, now head of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Gold says he has learned much from his previous experiences as prime minister and foreign minister, as well as his stint as opposition leader in between. "He knows what it's like being at the apex of power. That's an advantage. I think now there are fewer surprises. He knows what's essential and what's just noise."
The botched flotilla raid was certainly unexpected. Netanyahu has surrounded himself with a tight group of six ministers, known as the "septet." The decisionmakers signed off on what they thought was a straightforward commandeering of the flotilla, as has been done with previous boats carrying activists trying to reach Gaza. Now, of course, everything looks different.
"He's trying to manage his way out from something he didn't even consider could happen," says Dan Meridor, a veteran Likud colleague who is deputy prime minister and minister of intelligence and atomic energy. "The decision was made to carry this out with actions that, judging on past experience, seemed routine, and which was presented as something that could be dealt with without violence. Whether it was a smart move or not, there was no intent to harm."
At 80, FORMER Ambassador Shoval has a half century of experience in Israeli politics; few active Likud Party figures have had as many years to observe and work with Netanyahu as he has. That is, unless one counts the luminaries of Likud's ideological forerunner, the Revisionist Zionist movement, in which Netanyahu's 100-year-old father, Prof. Benzion Netanyahu, was once a prominent figure. The movement, founded by Zeev Jabotinsky, attracted secular nationalists who were opposed to the practical (read conciliatory) Zionism in the style of David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel's first prime minister. Instead, they promoted the idea of a Greater Israel, arguing for a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River.
Netanyahu's hard line on terrorism may also have been shaped by having grown up in the shadow of his older brother, Yoni, the head of an Israeli army commando unit. Yoni was killed in 1976 in Uganda during Operation Entebbe, in which Israeli soldiers overtook a group of Palestinian hijackers who had seized an Air France plane.
Although the Greater Israel ideology has all but died out from mainstream rhetoric, some in the extended Netanyahu family – and that of his wife, Sara – still hold its ideals dear. It is because of such a right-wing pedigree that many doubt whether Netanyahu is sincere about his ostensible conversion to the concept of two states for two peoples.
Shoval insists that Netanyahu is more practical and less dogmatic than many would believe. "I always said that he was a pragmatist, much beyond some of his friends in the party," Shoval says.
Mr. Meridor, once referred to as one of Likud's "young princes," insists Bibi has come far from where he started. But the maximum he is willing to give, he says, may not meet the minimum of what Palestinians feel entitled to receive. "When someone that high, of that stature, a leader of a nation and a political party, proposes that we are moving towards two states, it has a very important effect on the politics of this country, on the philosophy, on the Weltanschauung," says Meridor.
"I say this because I think he meant it. Does that mean he will go the length of the whole road necessary to get an agreement? I'm not sure. And I'm not sure that even I am ready to go as far as the Arabs want, although I'm ready to go a very long way. But I think he has crossed a bridge."