Netanyahu Wins Likud Race, Eyes PM Role

Likud Party leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu votes at the party's primary elections, in Jerusalem, Tuesday. Aug. 14, 2007. Members of Israel's hardline Likud party voted in a leadership primary Tuesday, with Netanyahu assured of victory but concerned a strong showing by settler extremists could embarrass him and the party.(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner) (Sebastian Scheiner - AP)

Though Feiglin counted on the support of only 10 percent of Likud's members, he stood to win as much as 30 percent of the vote because of pro-Netanyahu no-shows, Crystal said before the polls closed.

That level of support "would brand the Likud as negative, reactionary, and delusional, which would play into the hands of its political rivals," commentator Yossi Verter wrote Tuesday in the Haaretz daily.

Security guards barred Feiglin and his supporters from entering the hall where Netanyahu delivered his victory speech. Crystal interpreted this as a sign of what Netanyahu had in store for the party's radical faction now that the primary race was over.

"Whoever doesn't let Feiglin into the hall apparently intends to throw him and his supporters out of the Likud," Crystal said. "Let's see if he succeeds."

Likud dominated Israeli politics for nearly three decades until 2005, when party leader Ariel Sharon bolted to form the centrist Kadima, taking top Likud legislators with him. Sharon was incapacitated by a stroke in early 2006 and replaced by Olmert, another former Likud politician who led Kadima to victory in elections several months later.

Likud fell apart in that vote, shrinking to 12 seats in Israel's 120-seat parliament from 38 in the previous elections in 2003.

But Netanyahu's hawkish policies appear to have gained renewed popularity with an Israeli public frustrated by ongoing rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and angry over the country's inconclusive war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon last summer.

Netanyahu was a vocal opponent of Israeli-Palestinian peace deals in the early 1990s, but later, as prime minister from 1996 to 1999, he negotiated two interim peace deals and handed over most of the West Bank town of Hebron to the Palestinian Authority.

Still, his relations with the Palestinians were acrimonious and his ties with the Clinton administration, which wanted to see more Israeli flexibility, were often strained. His shaky coalition government fell apart in 1999, and he was defeated by Barak in elections that year.

After his defeat, he resigned as Likud's chairman and left politics for three years before returning as foreign minister and finance minister under Sharon. He quit the Cabinet two weeks before Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip to protest the pullout, taking Likud into the opposition.

The author of several books on terrorism and Israeli policy, Netanyahu is the son of a hardline Zionist ideologue and the brother of one of Israel's most famous war heroes _ Yoni Netanyahu, who died commanding Israel's legendary hostage rescue at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976.