Word: netanyahu
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...carnage in Tel Aviv was only the latest, some would say inevitable, result of the troubles that have piled up during Netanyahu's 10 months in power. One difficulty was plain old inexperience. Netanyahu came into office almost wholly without practice in the real business of government. His energies in public life were spent crafting an image and smoothly making arguments for or against policies, but not formulating them. He never mastered strategy, only shifting tactics. In command of a telegenic appearance and a glib tongue, he figured his rhetoric could explain away his mistakes...
...Netanyahu was always an outsider in the Likud hierarchy, which left him without the old-boy network essential to every Prime Minister. Instead, he surrounded himself with remarkably undistinguished loyalists who did not have the cleverness or clout to head off mistakes or remedy them. Last week, just before the bombing, the police were getting ready to deliver their verdict on allegedly corrupt deals behind his misguided appointment of a thoroughly underqualified Attorney General. Even if Netanyahu escapes direct taint, two close aides could face indictment...
Inexperience disrupted the peace process as well. At the outset, recalls a senior U.S. official, "this group of Israelis assumed they could just roll Yasser Arafat." After an early interview, a Jerusalem Post reporter wrote that it was clear Netanyahu hadn't actually read the details of the Oslo accords. For two months his men refused to deal with Arafat's chief negotiator. Even when pressure from Washington got talks under way, Netanyahu thought he could gain leverage by restricting Arafat's use of his helicopter...
What brought Netanyahu his worst grief, though, was his own divided feelings. From the moment he took office, he has ricocheted between the irreconcilable demands of his ideology and his ambition. He has always damned the basic principle of exchanging land for peace. But he is just as eager to succeed--to win power, to stay in power, to earn history's regard--and he has been savvy enough to recognize there is no going back. Peace is what a majority of Israel's voters want, and a Prime Minister wishing to stay in office had better deliver...
Time and again that has forced him to be pragmatic, to keep negotiations moving by retreating from his core ideology and making compromises with the Palestinians. But every time he does, his base supporters among Israel's hard-liners threaten to topple his coalition government, and Netanyahu has to come up with a countervailing move to pacify them...