HOLON, Israel – Benjamin Netanyahu looks thinner and paler these days. Gone is the swagger of previous political campaigns. But he remains tireless, traipsing among shopping centres and television studios, trying to persuade a weary and polarised country to return him to office for up to another four years in Israeli elections on Oct 27.
At 77, he is already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. If he is to extend that tenure, he has to sell the deeply divided electorate on the new, more hawkish version of himself – and of Israel.