His challenger, Yitzhak "Bougie" Herzog (pictured, left), is not charismatic.
And, on paper, he could indeed reshape a coalition that would more eagerly bid for a deal with the Palestinians.The current opposition, led by the Labour party leader, Yitzhak ("Bougie") Herzog, with 15 seats, would leap at the chance.
The final opinion polls – released on Friday ahead of a four-day moratorium on publishing surveys of voter intentions – put the centre-left Zionist Union, headed by opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog and former peace negotiator Tzipi Livni, ahead with 25 to 26 seats, and Netanyahu's Likud taking 20 to 22 in the 120-seat Knesset.
The 1993 handshake between Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, was a rare moment of hope in the bitter Middle East conflict.
He was summoned by Mossad head Yitzhak Hofi and told that Mossad's Tehran representative, Eliezar Shafrir, had received a plea to assassinate Khomeini from Shapour Bakhtiar, appointed caretaker prime minister by the Shah to head off growing protests.
"How can we demand the world respect our synagogues and cemeteries, if we don't do the same to their holy sites?" asks Yitzhak Reiter, a former Arab-affairs adviser to the prime minister and the author of a book about Beersheba's mosque.
Yitzhak Herzog, the leader of the main opposition Labour party, called it "a stain on the face of the nation and its citizens".
But his police were half-restraining the rioters, and behind the public recriminations, the web of discreet contacts—symbolised by a secret meeting, just before the bombing, between Mr Arafat and Yitzhak Molcho, one of Binyamin Netanyahu's advisers was never completely ruptured.By midweek the Americans had decided to send in Dennis Ross, their Middle East troubleshooter.
Syria insists that the first step must be Israel's reaffirmation of the "Rabin deposit" (the late Yitzhak Rabin's conditional willingness to withdraw fully from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights).
After 1977, the Likud governments of Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir set out frankly, for religious-ideological reasons, to make the occupied territories part of a Greater Israel, in defiance of the UN and of the logic of 242.
The army was confident that it could win if it struck first, but Yitzhak Rabin, the chief of staff, suffered a nervous collapse on the eve of battle.
