Most commentators have pointed out that Benjamin Netanyahu
spurned his supporters as soon as they boosted him into office,
turned his party into rubberstamping hacks, abandoned ideological
guidelines he nevertheless still touts, depended upon
improvisation, promised everything to everybody until thoroughly
distrusted, and conceded much to the Left without being perceived
as centrist. Congress and US Jewry were receptive to what he
might disillusion them about but he failed to explain his cause,
perhaps because he didn't have one.

Leaving his natural allies confused, he campaigned as a loner.
Having pressed for separate elections for P.M., he reduced his
own party's voter appeal, then had difficulty getting
sufficiently nationalistic a coalition. As head of a centrist
coalition, he could please neither side nor accomplish much. For
failing to plan and perhaps daunted by the threat of a general
strike to retain monopolies and their extortionate wages, he
failed sufficiently to reform the economy he was one of the few
to understand. Those are the typical analyses.

A less routine analysis is that had he opened the Rabin
assassination archives, exposed the cover-up, and gone on to
investigate, expose, and punish the collaborators in the Rabin
dirty tricks, then the Left would have been destroyed politically
for a decade. Netanyahu would have had a free hand and no
serious electoral opposition this time.

That tack would have required another reform that I stress.
Immediately on assuming office, Netanyahu should have neutralized
the still leftist-controlled, Israeli broadcasting industry. Then
not all the publicity would have been biased against him.
Competition would have kept the leftist organs on their toes. He
could have explained his views in greater depth. He might have
become a national leader instead of a temporizer with critics.

I think there is another profound failing in his candidacy which
other commentators overlook. His basic strategy, to insist on
PLO/PA reciprocity in compliance, was flawed. It was a negative
and half-hearted approach. Nobody cared much about PLO
compliance. It as an approach which the ZOA pursued in Congress
with limited success. The weakness of that approach is that
Congress rarely
challenges the President or the State Dept. on foreign policy.

The weak emotional pull of compliance was evidence from the hasty
way in which Peres and Beilin had Oslo set up. The agreement
didn't protect Israel's interests. Peres wasn't interested in
that nor particularly in Israel's survival as a Jewish state. He
wanted to give the PLO magnanimous concessions and imagine he
secured peace. Then Israel would prosper, regardless of its
boundaries. First let's see the lion lay down with the lamb.

Considering the State Dept's. decades-long scheming to shift
Yesha to the Arabs, any US concern about Arab compliance would be
surprising. The US attitude was evident when first the US failed
to object to PLO violations and then falsely certified to PLO
compliance. That Netanyahu brought the US further into Oslo was
a blunder if even done in innocence.

Netanyahu the pragmatist never realized that what he called
pragmatism was opportunism whose shallowness could not match the
moral standing and surer footing from the ideological analyses he
disdained. His stand on reciprocity was ideologically crippling.
How so?

The basis of reciprocity is the assumption that with due
firmness, the other side eventually would come to terms. That
assumption is false. It does not apply to the Arabs when the
Arabs have support from the Israeli Left, the US government, the
EU, the UN, and the major Media.

The assumption implies that Oslo is a peace process. Peace never
was the Arab goal. The US knew it. Why didn't Netanyahu?

Ideologically, that assumption also implied that there are no
overriding nationalist objections to conceding parts of the Land
of Israel to the enemies of the State of Israel. No overriding
objections, no ideological anchor to moor to. In fact, no
recognition of the PLO still as the enemy.

How can you fight an enemy you don't acknowledge as such, that in
fact you are pretending is a partner in peace? That pretence
gave the advantage to the double-dealing PLO, which under the
guise of peace partnership continued its struggle for hegemony.

Hemmed in by the constraints of fallacious assumptions, actually
an ideology, an ideology of make-believe, Netanyahu could not
make a strong case against conceding. Where he could have posed
as valiant, he appeared as stubborn. The people elected a cabal
that will not be so "stubborn."

Even if Netanyahu had started off negotiating, he could have
prepared the people for an explanation of reality -- Arab
recalcitrance. Suppose he said that he is willing to negotiate
but genuinely persisted in his demand for reciprocity from the
start. Instead of waiting for the pressure to concede on Hebron
to exceed his ability to resist, he would have explained the Arab
violations so thoroughly that even Clinton and a lot of his party
might not have gotten re-elected, as the failure of their foreign
policy, nay, its stupidity, became plain. That would have been
the start of alerting the Israeli electorate to Arab plans.

Then after getting the country and the world familiar with the
Arab violations, suppose he educated the public to the Arabs'
phased plan for the conquest of Israel and their general pact
violations. He would have burst his restraints.

Finally, he would question whether the Arabs intend to fulfill
Oslo and whether peace is their object. He'd draw people to the
conclusion that Oslo is not a peace process. It is a fraud.
Those who promote it know it. They just don't care.

When he next would bring up the illegalities of Oslo and its
inauguration, and he would discuss alternatives, the public would
be ready to annex most of Yesha.

As for Clinton's efforts to impose his candidates upon the
Israeli electorate, Netanyahu could have and should have turned
that against Clinton and his candidates. He should have pried
open the diaspora mentality of Israelis, forcing them to realize
that they cannot please the US government and should not try,
because the US does not care about Israel and does not know or
care what is in its own interest, either. He should have stirred
resentment against dictation by a US President whose policies are
such failures as to have sunk the US, were it a minor power.
Instead, Netanyahu left the people, his and ours, under the
illusion that the State Dept., gunning for Yesha, is an "honest
broker." "Honest broker," "peace partner," and "peace process" -
- the illusions he failed to puncture or even challenge.

Had Netanyahu done that, he'd be using this new term of office to
establish a Jewish constitution to neutralize the Arab vote and
preserve his country.

As for the Media, NPR commented, as Barak proclaimed himself P.M.
of all the people, that Barak was a unifier while Netanyahu was
divisive. Actually, Barak's and allied parties ran anti-Orthodox
campaigns and were divisive, as Labor was divisive during the
time of Rabin and Peres.

When Netanyahu came in, he, too, proclaimed himself P.M. of all
the people and he was. He tried to ride all the horses but
consequently couldn't hold onto any.

This election was about hubris (though not for the venal Shas
Party which deserved to be trounced for blaming its leader's
prosecution on prejudice against Oriental Jews). People in power
get over-confident. The voters rise up against them. Yes, this
election turned into a referendum on a P.M. who defended his
adherence to misleadingly worded statements as keeping his
campaign promises. Inconsistently, it ignored Labor's having
lost the prior election for secretly promising the Arabs the
opposite of what its platform promised the Jewish people. The
Israeli public never caught on sufficiently to Labor's deception.
For all Netanyahu's media-savvy, he didn't make it clear to them.

If ever a man could be placed to destroy the nationalist camp, it
was as if Netanyahu were sent in to do that. The open question
is, why didn't Netanyahu expose the Rabin dirty tricks and
assassination cover-up? What and who is Netanyahu?