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The Netanyahu era: From crisis to crisis, 1996–99

The defeat of Benjamin Netanyahu by Ehud Barak in Israel's 1999 elections brought to an end one of the most interesting and complex periods of Israeli history. For three years following his surprise election victory over Shimon Peres in June 1996 Netanyahu led Israel with an administration in a state of near permanent crisis which appeared close to collapse on numerous occasions before its eventual disintegration in December 1998. During the same period Israel's youngest and least experienced Prime Minister was faced with dealing with an increasingly complex set of peace negotiations which were left over from the previous governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. In effect, both Rabin and Peres had left the difficult stages of reaching agreement with the Palestinians (and the Syrians) to a second term Labour-led government. The outcome of the 1996 elections meant that it was Netanyahu and the Likud who were charged with attempting to reach an agreement with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) over Hebron and negotiating the major transfer of lands in the West Bank to PA control. In addition, the administration was scheduled to start the final status negotiations. These negotiations include issues such as statehood, the status of Jerusalem and the question of Palestinian refugees. It is at this stage that Israel will be called upon to make a number of compromises. In reality, these negotiations were overshadowed by problems between 1996 and 1999 with the Interim Agreements which culminated in the Wye Memorandum in 1998, the event which led to collapse of the administration. It is still too premature to detail the successes and failures of the Netanyahu era from an historical perspective. Such was the divisive nature of Netanyahu that there are two polarized academic perspectives on this period. The first concentrates on 'the wasted opportunities' between 1996 and 1999 and argues that Netanyahu nearly destroyed the peace process. The second suggests that the Netanyahu era was a