Bibi vs. Netanyahu
Netanyahu's first term as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999, revealed a risk-averse, deeply conservative politician hewing closely to his Likud Party's line -- a man not of history and vision, but instead a clever politician whose primary interest was in maintaining a tough-minded image as a defender of Israel's security, one deeply suspicious and unsentimental about the Arabs.
In the wake of Rabin's assassination and Peres's unsuccessful bid to succeed him, Netanyahu emerged as a critic of the peace process begun at Oslo in 1993. He was deeply suspicious of Yasir Arafat and the Americans, and focused more on protecting settlements (indeed, expanding them), and fighting terror than on an expansive view of the peace process. His September 1996 decision to open the Hasmonean tunnel in Jerusalem sparked some of the worst Israeli-Palestinian violence since the Oslo process began.
And yet, paradoxically, it was that same tunnel crisis that triggered a diplomatic process that would produce two interim agreements between Arafat and Netanyahu (handshakes, too). This would make Bibi -- Oslo's worst critic -- the first Likud prime minister to concede any West Bank territory. And to Netanyahu's credit, by focusing on Palestinian security performance and accountability, there was a dramatic reduction in terror attacks during those years.
But unlike Rabin -- also a tough negotiator, but one with a strategy -- Netanyahu seemed to have no purpose other than maneuver and delay. He might be prepared to take one step forward by signing the Hebron agreement with the Palestinians in early 1997, but then he would take a step back a month later to compensate his political base by moving ahead with settlement construction in the controversial Har Homa neighborhood in Jerusalem.
It was during these years that several Clinton administration officials who would later serve with Obama -- including Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton -- got their first impressions of Bibi. And they no doubt helped shape the new president's view of the prime minister as something of a con man. Obama's wrong-headed decision to push for a freeze on settlement construction (from which he would later back down) may well have been a result of their message: You can't work with this guy; you need to confront him.
And yet, Netanyahu's first term as premier (and part of his second) also revealed that he could be moved. His career is full of strategic retreats: He said he wouldn't sign an agreement with Arafat, but he did. He said wouldn't give back West Bank land, but he did. He said wouldn't agree to the concept of a Palestinian state even on paper, but he has. And he said he'd never agree to a settlement freeze, even a de facto one -- but then he did for 10 months (though only outside of Jerusalem).
In a sense, Bibi, the tough-talking Likud pol, is at war with Netanyahu, the man who aspires to be a great Israeli prime minister. And this tension leaves him open to compromise but also to retrenchment.
Netanyahu's brash exterior masks a more uncertain, unsure, and conflicted interior. He desperately wants to succeed -- and like most politicians, wants to be loved. He knows he'll have to take risks to succeed, but he's not conditioned by either nature or ideology to accept them -- particularly when it comes to deals with the Palestinians. So his mode is to take a step forward and then a step or two back.
The truth is Bibi has never been tested as prime minister with either a huge diplomatic opportunity or a national security crisis that forced him to take real risks. And unlike Rabin, Peres, or his Defense Minister Ehud Barak, he has no real history of proactive risk-taking on the peace or national security side. One example -- the attempted assassination of Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal in Amman in 1997 -- ended disastrously.
On the two critical foreign-policy issues facing Israel today -- Iran and the Palestinians -- it stands to reason that Netanyahu would be more inclined to take risks on the former and avoid them on the latter. Indeed, the peace process is well out of Netanyahu's comfort zone precisely because it bumps up against his own mistrust of the Arabs, his ideology, and party politics. Countering the Iranian nuclear threat, on the other hand, is much more in line with Bibi's view of the kind of heroic action consistent with his self-image.
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