Word: netanyahu
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Aside from ambition, self-regard and a glossy finish, his critics have asked, what else is there to Netanyahu? Many Israelis have found him too smooth to be taken seriously. As Netanyahu himself observes, that has given him the advantage of being underestimated. Those who would work with him, or against him, will now need to reassess. In fact, he has many gifts--intelligence, guts, tenacity--and if, by the standards of Israeli politics, he hasn't had a long career or done all that much, what he has done, he's done notably well...
...Netanyahu was raised to achieve. His mother Cela studied law, and his father Benzion is a historian whose lifework, a study of the Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, was published to acclaim last year. Called Bibi from childhood, after a cousin, Netanyahu inherited his right-wing politics from his father, a disciple of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. To members of that movement even David Ben-Gurion was not sufficiently nationalist. Netanyahu can be touchy about his family. Last week his mother lent a Time photographer six pictures of him as a youngster, then called urgently...
...When Netanyahu was 14, he moved with his family to Pennsylvania, where his father taught college. Netanyahu attended high school in a Philadelphia suburb but after graduating, returned to Israel to serve with distinction for five years in Sayeret Matkal, an elite special-forces unit. At 22, he was among the commandos who, in 1972, successfully stormed a hijacked jet on the tarmac at the Tel Aviv airport. Jonathan served in the same unit, and was killed in 1976 while leading the team that rescued the passengers of a hijacked plane at the Entebbe airport in Uganda. Jonathan's death...
During the party-leadership campaign, Netanyahu brought a U.S.-style media scandal upon himself. Hoping to head off damaging rumors, he appeared on the main TV-news program to confess that he had cheated on his wife Sara. He charged that a political rival, by which he plainly meant former Foreign Minister David Levy, was trying to blackmail him with an incriminating videotape. Police found no evidence to support the charge, and Netanyahu was compelled to apologize to Levy...
TIME asked several distinguished observers of the Middle East to predict the future of the peace process under Netanyahu. To one, the process "is at an end." To another, civil war looms among the Palestinians, and to a third, Netanyahu has a chance to heal Israel's "suicidal divisiveness...