Word: netanyahu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sharon, of course, will face an uphill battle to cobble together a parliamentary majority, and no one will be surprised if Israelis are back at the polls within a year. And that election could see comebacks by everyone from Shimon Peres or Barak to Benjamin Netanyahu. Because there's no such thing as being politically dead in Israel - until three days before the election, polls were showing that three-time loser Peres had a better chance than Barak of beating Sharon, who enjoyed a huge lead despite being held responsible for two decades of Israeli misery in Lebanon...
...wealthy supporter. Sharon was worried about what Barak was about to give up to Arafat in the name of peace. But he saw a bright spot: "I know that this will lead to elections, and I'll be the candidate to run against Barak." Finkelstein, who advised Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's predecessor as Likud leader, laid out a strategy. "You need to start showing that you support peace," he said, "but a different kind of peace than Barak. People are going to have to understand the real Sharon...
Sharon began to gear up an image as a man committed to a workable peace deal. There was a second front to the campaign: Sharon had to beat off a possible resurrection of Netanyahu, who was itching to return to politics after being cleared of corruption charges. That two-front struggle was captured in the most famous walk Sharon will probably ever make--his tour of the Temple Mount at the end of September. It was a maneuver designed to take the hard-line limelight from Netanyahu by asserting Israeli sovereignty over a site that is also claimed by Arafat...
...mask, either. Sharon may have been responsible for such disastrous military misadventures as Israel's invasion of Lebanon, but he's also proven himself capable of rising above his party's ideological concerns in the interests of nailing down peace deals. During his brief spell as Benjamin Netanyahu's foreign minister, for example, Sharon persuaded the reluctant prime minister to hand over most of the West Bank city of Hebron to Palestinian control. His objective is not to stop the peace process altogether, but to be in control of it and drive hard bargains. While Barak had been weighing...
...things work out as Barak and Sharon probably hope, it may mean a reshuffling of the deck chairs. It could produce a unity government under Sharon that would last a while. But then that was precisely why Benjamin Netanyahu stayed out of the fray - without a new parliamentary election to change the balance of power, it's simply rearranging the deck chairs on what might still be a political Titanic...