But officials have been taken aback by the extent of public hostility.
"The extent of the hostility shown towards him," Bew writes, "should caution us against the disingenuous myth-making around him today".
Federal elections scheduled for 2013 were close enough that political parties were attempting to portray an image of internal cohesion while still far enough away that campaigns had not yet polarized the parties to the extent of mutual hostility.
Even with all this, the extent of the hostility expressed by Israeli Jews towards the country's Arab citizens, reported in an opinion survey this week, still comes as a shock: among much else, 42% said they don't want their children in the same school class with Arab children and 42% don't want to live in the same building with Arabs.
"They give birth astride of a grave," Samuel Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot, and in the Middle East that description is terribly concrete: all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, were born into this conflict, and our identity is formulated, to no small extent, in terms of hostility and fear, survival and death.
Barack Obama secured the comeback he desperately needed in the second presidential debate against Mitt Romney, finishing the night on top after a series of fierce clashes in which the two made no attempt to hide the extent of their personal hostility.
Hostility was measured using the 20-item Chinese Hostility Inventory Short-Form (CHI-SF) [ 38], which contained four dimensions of hostility: (1) hostile cognition (six items, α =.78); (2) hostile affection (four items, α =.78); (3) expressive hostility (five items, α =.76); and (4) suppressive hostility (five items, α =.73).
"I was expecting a little bit of hostility but not to that extent," du Plessis told reporters.
To some extent, the hostility is a byproduct not only of the abdication of common sense, but of widespread ignorance of state and local laws.
