THE MIDEAST: Likud as It Gets The Administration is stuck with Netanyahu.

BENJAMIN Netanyahu, the great Houdini of Israeli politics, has done it again. A day after returning from the Wye Plantation peace summit with Yasser Arafat, Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, defied his own ultra-nationalists to defeat yet another motion of no confidence.

His center-right coalition government commands a bare majority of 61 to 59 in the Knesset, the single-chamber Israeli parliament. And at least two Cabinet members from his own party-the science and transportation ministers-had threatened to vote against the agreement reached at Wye. But in the end, the no-confidence motion commanded only eight votes and the two ministers ducked the vote and stayed in the cabinet. After yet another political cliffhanger, Netanyahu lives to fight another day.

In the two and a half years Netanyahu has led his country, he has been reviled by his critics (and revered by his far fewer friends) much more than any other Israeli prime minister. Most of all, he has withstood the barely concealed anger, frustration, rage, and plain malice of the government of his country's key protector and ally: the United States. How does he get away with it? Being underestimated-especially by American policymakers-helps a lot. The Clinton Administration did not expect-or want-Net- anyahu to win his country's May 1996 general election. The vote was rightly seen at home and abroad as a referendum on the wisdom of the ruling Labour Party's conduct of the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians. The U.S. government, accepting the analysis of its veteran Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, was convinced that then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres would win comfortably. The United States was deluded by the fact that repeated opinion polls in Israel then as now put huge majorities of 70 to 80 per cent in favor of "peace." No one stopped to ask what "peace" exactly meant to the Israelis responding to those polls.

It has become part of the mythology of the Israeli Left-and also of American Jewish doves and many Clinton policymakers-that the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 was the turning point that threw the 1996 election to Netanyahu because Rabin's politically inept successor, Peres, was doomed to lose. The truth is closer to the reverse.

Before the assassination, Netanyahu was running neck and neck with Rabin in opinion polls. This despite the fact that Netanyahu had only a fraction of Rabin's enormous experience as a soldier and statesman. Netanyahu and his strategists were confident of victory. But after Rabin's death, Netanyahu at once plunged 20 to 30 points behind Peres.

It took the slaughter of dozens of Israelis in a wave of Arab bomb attacks to switch the momentum back to Netanyahu, who had repeatedly warned of such attacks. Peres's lifelong inability to win elections kicked in and did the rest. His defeat in the fifth of five national elections in which he led Labour-a record of failure incomparable in his country's history-took Mr. Ross and his colleagues entirely by surprise. Even now, two and a half years later, the shock has not worn off. This makes Ross, as Arafat clearly realizes, Netanyahu's secret weapon. For he has repeatedly miscalculated and underestimated Netanyahu's enduring domestic political strength and inadvertently reinforced it.

When Netanyahu first met Madeleine Albright, he found her a far cry from her gracious, low-key predecessor, Warren Christopher. Coming out of his first Washington meeting with her, Netanyahu looked as if he had just walked into a

buzz saw. Albright's frank (many would say brutal) and direct negotiating style left Israel's Great Communicator rambling and uncertain. It was Ross who gave Netanyahu the breathing space he needed.

Convinced that the 1996 hairsbreadth victory was an aberration and noting the fractious arguments within Netanyahu's governing coalition and its razor-thin majority, Ross advocated gently nudging Netanyahu into a National Unity Coalition government with Labour. This looked increasingly feasible after Labour dumped Peres and replaced him with former Army Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, the most highly decorated combat hero in Israeli history. Barak was much more hawkish than Peres. U.S. policymakers embraced this policy. They believed that, by moving to the center, the essentially pragmatic Netanyahu could free himself of his own right wing and make a more moderate peace, influenced by Barak and other Labour leaders. So enamored were Ross and his cohorts of this vision that when Albright visited Israel prior to the Wye conference, Ross's smooth-running leak machine spread the word that Netanyahu was on the verge of accepting a coalition deal with Barak.

Now, despite all expectations, Netanyahu is stronger than ever. Barak and the other representatives of pro-peace parties, much as they loathe Netanyahu, refused to support the latest Knesset no-confidence motion against the prime minister, because they are committed to reviving the peace process. In so doing, they have virtually handed Netanyahu's Likud Party the next elections. How so? Labour has given Netanyahu a crucial entr?e into the potent Israeli centrist vote. By endorsing Wye, Labour has confirmed Netanyahu's argument that he can get a better deal out of the Palestinians and the Americans than the party of Rabin and Peres.

Also, over the past year, Barak's strategy of wooing Sephardic Jews-who make up 55 to 60 per cent of all Israeli Jews-has fizzled miserably. The final humiliating blow came last July. Former Army General Ori Orr, Barak's closest ally and personal friend in Labour, gave an extraordinary interview to the leading Tel Aviv liberal newspaper, Ha'aretz, in which he blasted Moroccan Jews-the largest Sephardic ethnic group-as not very bright, and also as ungrateful for all that Labour had done for them. Barak at first temporized and appeared blind to the enormity of the insult. When he finally disavowed Orr, he appeared to do so only reluctantly. Lamented Haim Ramon, a prominent colleague and rival of Barak's in Labour, "There is a God. And he is a Likudnik."

By contrast, Netanyahu has continued to tend to his own political grassroots. His alliance with the powerful and rising ultra-Orthodox remains strong. However much the fundamentalist religious-nationalist leaders of the National Religious Party may threaten to run a direct-election candidate against him for prime minister, Netanyahu knows they will not dare risk throwing the election to Labour.

The great majority of Israel's 700,000 Russian immigrants abhor the ultra-Orthodox lock on church-state affairs and are more pragmatic on the peace process than Netanyahu and his immediate supporters. But they continue to be loyal to Natan Sharansky and his Yisrael B'Aliya Party. A close personal friend of Netanyahu, Sharansky is both far more Orthodox in his personal life and political views, and far more suspicious of the Palestinians, than is generally recognized. He will keep the Russian Jews firmly in Netanyahu's camp.

With religious voters, the Russians, and the Sephardim already with him, Netanyahu by signing the Wye deal has probably convinced enough centrist voters to back him to lock up the next election. This will be news to U.S. policymakers. But it is an assessment privately shared by Arafat's political analysts and most Labour Party experts. If the Clinton administration would finally acknowledge that Netanyahu represents a dominant and enduring consensus in Israel on the peace process, it might be able to forge tougher deals with him. Its hope that he will fall, if not on this Knesset vote, then surely on the next one, is simply a flight from reality. And the ballyhoo over the interim agreement at Wye should not obscure this crucial fact, as Israel's Houdini celebrates yet another tactical triumph over his adversaries-both at home and in America.