You love Netanyahu because he is an eloquent speaker. He was a lousy Prime Minister and he is putting his personal ambition ahead of what is good for his party or Israel as a whole. There was a reason that he lost to Sharon by a landslide in the last Likud primary just as there was a reason that he lost in a landslide to Barak when he stood for reelection. The right abandoned him then and brought down the government over Wye River and pulling out of Hebron. He isn't half the leader Prime Minister Sharon is.
Yes, Bibi speaks well. Let him be a spokesman but keep him away from the reigns of power.
What I gather is Likud is full of sore losers who are threatening to bolt if their chosen candidate fails to win. Why not just have the primary and then unify behind whoever wins it?
Ari Shavit lays it out flat:
"... Only then did I begin to understand that there were two distinct phenomena here. One is Netanyahu himself, and the other is hatred of Netanyahu, a crusade that is gradually taking center stage in our lives. I decided to ask myself the simplest question of all: Why is it that we hate Benjamin Netanyahu so much?
Is it because our security situation has reached unprecedented lows during his tenure? Is it because over 200 people have been killed in our streets and our buses and our shopping centers?
Oops, wrong government. All this happened while Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were in charge. At the time, we just kept quiet. We didn't think it was so terrible. We, who now hate Netanyahu so much, never even considered the idea of hating Rabin and Peres because of their responsibility for the bloodshed. ...
So, do we hate Benjamin Netanyahu because his government hastily and recklessly adopted irreversible historic decisions with blatant disregard for proper procedure, not bothering to take account of the feelings of half the country, only bothering to receive Knesset approval after the fact? ...
Oops. That would be the Rabin and Peres governments. As for ourselves, we simply remained silent. We did not feel that proper procedure and fair democratic rules and proper public debate were so important. We, who hate Netanyahu so much because he is forcing his worldview upon us, did not even consider hating Rabin and Peres for the patronizing manner in which they pushed through such a fateful historic decision, forcing their worldview upon the entire Israeli public. ...
Thanks to our hatred of Netanyahu, we can convince ourselves that if we only beat up our prime minister a little harder, if we could only manage to break his political bones, if we could only vanquish him and get him out of our lives, then everything would revert to the simple, sweet life that once was. Once again, like in the spring and summer of 1992, and the autumn and winter of 1993, we would be able to breath in that exhilarating, heady aroma of the end of history, the end of wars, the end of the conflict. The intoxicating taste of the end of days. "