Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: ben fatto, Bibi!

a sei mesi dall'insediamento, e nonostante le pessime previsioni, la
popolarita' di Netanyahou e' ai massimi storici
Vuoi vedere che la maggioranza degli israeliani la pensa come lui, a
proposito del carattere ebraico dello Stato?
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/13444/the-lucky-likudnik/print/
M. Weiss
The Lucky Likudnik
Why Benjamin Netanyahu is having a more successful term than anyone
expected
A funny thing happened on the way to Benjamin Netanyahu’s predicted
implosion as prime minister: he rebounded. According to a recent
Israeli opinion poll, the man who couldn’t win enough votes to become
prime minister without backroom coalition bartering is doing better
than everyone expected. With a general approval rating of 49 percent,
which is high by Israeli standards, Netanyahu has, in the first six
months of his second administration, definitively outstripped all
other would-be challengers, including his big rival, Tzipi Livni,
whose Kadima party performed better than Netanyahu’s Likud in
February’s election.
Netanyahu’s surer hold on power is due in large part to savvy
political instincts. As he admitted in private discussion with
colleagues recently, reported by Haaretz, his July speech at Bar-Ilan
University, in which he for the first time consented to Palestinian
statehood, cooled somewhat the domestic media’s hatred of him. But
Bibi’s boom is also related to a more ephemeral political phenomenon:
luck.
For starters, the ongoing legal woes of his controversial foreign
minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who looks set to resign any day, have
only consolidated Netanyahu’s singular influence in a top-heavy and
overloaded cabinet. Second, the recent turmoil in Iran helped
legitimize a perennial pessimist who’s been saying for years that
Islamist governments can’t be negotiated with. And perhaps most
impressively, Netanyahu has benefited from taking on Barack Obama—
perhaps the only politician in the world of whom this could be said.
Netanyahu’s skills as a political tactician have improved greatly in
the last decade. Indeed, understanding the unlikely successes of his
second term requires knowing a little about the failures of his first.
Originally elected in 1996, half a year after Yitzhak Rabin’s
assassination, Netanyahu was never fully embraced by a constituency
still reeling from the late failure of dovish hopes. Back then, “he
was lucky to be elected,” said Jerusalem Post pundit Shmuel Rosner.
“He was never accepted by elites who thought he was just this young,
hawkish guy who stole the election from Shimon Peres. He never got the
legitimacy he needed, either from the Israeli people or from the
Clinton administration.” According to Noah Pollak, a blogger on the
Middle East for Commentary, who’s regularly in touch with officials in
the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu was seen back then as an
“impediment to the peace process, the naysayer,” running against an
enormous tide of sympathy for reconciliation with the Arabs. As such,
he was someone whom Bill Clinton—always perceived as a friend to the
Jewish state—could easily undercut by appealing directly to the
Israeli people. Netanyahu’s response was to buckle to U.S. pressure,
making concessions to the Palestinians that he had vowed during the
campaign never to make, such as withdrawing from 80 percent of Hebron
in 1997, and signing the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which outlined
further withdrawals. Both of these gestures alienated Netanyahu’s
allies on the far right and cost him reelection in 1999. As Boston
Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote at the time, “the would-be Israeli
Churchill began to morph into a Chamberlain.”
Other neophyte mistakes, too, complicated Netanyahu’s maiden effort at
governing. Matt Silver, a communications professor at the Academic
College of Emek Yezreel, remembers vividly the unsuccessful
assassination attempt of Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal in 1997, which
Silver viewed then as Netanyahu’s attempted macho rite of passage gone
awry. “One journal called him a ‘mysterious bungler,’” Silver
recalled. “He had to prove himself, that he wasn’t this Johnny-come-
lately, [that] he was a real Israeli.”
No longer. According to Sherman and Rosner, Netanyahu has learned from
serving in subordinate roles in government in the past decade. His
tenure as both foreign minister and finance minister under Ariel
Sharon, many long-time observers of his career argue, taught him the
value of compromise and alliance-building—what his critics in the
Israeli press, including Nahum Barnea, the influential reporter for
Yedioth Aronoth, call “opportunism.” To Rosner, however, it was
telling that this time around, Netanyahu reached out to the Labor
Party, which received only 13 seats in the Knesset in the last
election, when he could have simply forged a narrow right-wing
coalition government. Retaining as defense minister Ehud Barak, with
whom Netanyahu served in the same IDF unit and is said to get along
with well personally, was also savvy. “He learned this from Sharon,”
said Rosner. “Bibi never liked Sharon, never trusted him, but he
learned from his achievements.”
And in the confrontation with the White House over settlement
expansion in the West Bank—the starkest challenge Netanyahu has faced
so far—Netanyahu has astonishingly emerged less scathed than Obama.
Unlike in 1996, the U.S. gambit of taking the case straight to the
Israeli people has backfired, Rosner and Pollak said, with Israelis
siding with Netanyahu over an even more internationally admired
Democratic president. (Since announcing the settlement freeze, Obama’s
approval rating in Israel, according to a Jerusalem Post-sponsored
Smith Research poll, has dropped from 31 percent to six percent.)
“Obama began exactly where Clinton left off—at Camp David,” Pollak
said. “He tried to weaken Bibi politically by making the Israeli
public fear a crisis in the relationship with the U.S. But Obama,
unlike Clinton, was elected with the baggage of Jeremiah Wright,
Rashid Khalidi, and Bill Ayers—these were strikes against him in
Israel. He compounded them by giving his first interview to Al
Arabiya, and making his first two big speeches in Arab Muslim venues,
Turkey and Cairo.”
Pollak suggests that Obama should have tried to cultivate a stronger
rapport with the Israeli street before attempting any “arm-twisting.”
Furthermore, halting construction in settlements that will likely go
to Israel in any prospective peace agreement—particularly the East
Jerusalem suburb of Ma’ale Adumin, which has 30,000 residents—is not
nearly the cause célèbre in Jerusalem that it is in Washington. “There
is no way you can have an agreement with Israel on a settlement freeze
that would be meaningful,” said Barnea, who thinks Obama should have
simply called for a freeze, which would have made Netanyahu sweat, but
not tried to negotiate the details of one, which Israel can’t do,
“legally or politically.” Negotiating the freeze “didn’t benefit
Bibi,” Barnea added, “it damaged the Obama administration, and made it
look ineffective in the eyes of the Arabs.”
Although Netanyahu has dismantled more outposts and roadblocks in the
West Bank than did his predecessor Ehud Olmert, and vowed to double
the number of Israeli inspectors of settlement construction, these
seeming capitulations to White House demands have been carried out
with little or no publicity.  According to Pollak, that’s the price of
being a pariah prime minister—not receiving credit for aiding
Palestinians—but so far, at least, Netanyahu’s coalition hasn’t
rebelled against him again for these concessions.
Additionally, an unforeseen international crisis has tacitly bolstered
Netanyahu’s credibility. Ayatollah Khameini’s ultra-violent reaction
to protests in Iran, following the contested reelection of President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also appeared to justify what Israel’s most
recognizable national security hardliner has been saying for years:
that the mullahs can’t be trusted. Yet Netanyahu has not sought to
take credit for being proven right. According to Daniel Seaman,
director of the Israeli Government Press Office, Netanyahu’s reticence
was strategic. “There’s an old Hebrew saying, ‘The work of the
righteous is done by others.’ To people, it’s clear where Bibi stood
on this issue. If he starts saying something about it, there’s going
to be an opposition. This way, he gets all the benefits out of being
right without claiming to be, and the opposition isn’t emboldened.”
Finally, Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right nationalist head of the
Yisrael Beiteinu party, whom Netanyahu appointed foreign minister much
to the chagrin of liberals at home and abroad, is facing a likely
indictment for corruption charges, and may soon be a headache no more.
Lieberman has promised to resign if he’s indicted, and a source in the
prime minister’s office said that in that likely scenario, Netanyahu
will keep the position vacant. “He can say he’s leaving it open to
Lieberman until he’s exonerated, or leave it open to entice Kadima,”
the source said. According to this theory, Netanyahu will run the
foreign ministry alongside Barak—longtime chum of Hillary Clinton and
Israeli’s preferred diplomat to the United States and Western Europe—
and Danny Ayalon, the current deputy foreign minister, who represents
the gentler face of Yisrael Beiteinu. As a troika, these men have all
along been crafting Israel’s foreign policy without the help or input
of Lieberman, who’s been there as a salve to his base. In fact,
already “Lieberman is foreign minister in name only,” said Rosner.
Of course, Netanyahu’s fortunes may soon turn again. “Public opinion
here, like in the states, is very flexible and exposed to mood,” said
Barnea. “Bibi is lucky because, temporarily, the day-to-day security
is basically good. Since the end of Operation Gaza, we don’t have any
rockets, any terrorist attacks inside Israel. It’s springtime for the
government.”
Barnea is quick to point out that this is only the beginning of a
tenuous coalition; what’s more, it’s the summer, when as many as
400,000 Israelis (roughly 10 percent of the population) are
vacationing abroad in Turkey, Europe, or the United States. “The
feeling is that the country is on hold, in a way,” said Barnea, who,
in covering Fatah’s sixth general assembly in Bethlehem, said the only
thing people he interviewed wanted to talk about was food. “There’s no
political news, only criminal. So let’s talk about the murder of a
homosexual in Tel Aviv, or the murder of a baby by a father who wants
to revenge his wife. If this is Bibi’s luck, OK. I call it August.”
Nevertheless, a rosier picture has thus emerged of Netanyahu’s
prospects than anyone last February would have painted. “The day after
Bibi formed his government, people were giving it a year at most,”
said Silver. “Now it’s two or three years.”

 popolarita' di Netanyahou e' ai massimi storici
anche quella del nano, il che non impedirà all'Italia di andare sempre
peggio. Non sapevo che ti fossi convertito anche alla religione
berlusconiana dei sondaggi