LAST Sunday, in his television debate with Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu was asked a question about the extraordinary events of January 1993, when he rushed to the studios of Israeli state TV to announce to astonished viewers that he had been cheating on his third wife Sara, that he believed he had been videotaped in the act, and that his enemies were threatening to distribute the tape unless he gave up his bid for the Likud party leadership.
Three years on, Mr Netanyahu was clearly expecting to be asked about the episode. It would have been downright bizarre, after all, if his interviewer had ignored this legendary behavioural glitch, this proof to his critics of Mr Netanyahu's dangerous impulsiveness and inability to cope with heavy pressure.
And he had his answer ready. Yes, he acknowledged, his handling of that awkward personal matter had been faulty (no videotape ever surfaced, no alleged blackmailers were ever produced, and Mr Netanyahu's campaign for the party leadership was an overwhelming success). And, yes, he admitted, he had caused unnecessary suffering to some of those closest to him. But that was nothing, he went on smoothly, compared to the suffering that Mr Peres was causing the entire people of Israel through his misguided handling of the peace process with the Palestinians.
The transition from personal to national impropriety was so abrupt, so daring a leap, that in the hall outside the studio, where dozens of Labour and Likud politicians had gathered to watch the debate, there was a moment of stunned disbelief. And then, from the seats where Mr Netanyahu's Likud supporters were congregated, there was laughter, relieved laughter, admiring laughter, at the sheer gall of the man - to transform his most awkward personal skeleton into another means of attacking Mr Peres and get away with it.
Mr Netanyahu did get away with it. He won the debate hands down, and with it the Israeli elections - convincing the last few wavering voters that he, and not Mr Peres, was the man to lead Israel to the millennium. Slick and superficial they might have been, but he had answers for every question.
Israel's ninth prime minister (in waiting) had long been known as the ultimate television politician, a master of the art who honed his skills in the United States, employing top speech and image consultants, during the years in the 1970s and 1980s that he served as a diplomat in New York, then Israel's spokesman at the United Nations, and as a deputy foreign minister in the last Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir.
And his performance in Sunday's debate merely underlined his extraordinary proficiency, in sad contrast to the hesitant, unfocused and insufficiently prepared Mr Peres. But what the Labour leader and his campaign chiefs either failed to notice or preferred to ignore, is that the Benjamin Netanyahu of 1996 is far more than a savvy media performer.
He has become a consumate politician, dizzyingly effective on the campaign trail, and equally skilled behind the scenes, where in three years as Likud leader he has rehabilitated a splintering party and managed to bring two of his most bitter and dangerous, rivals, David Levy and Rafael Eitan, both of whom had intended to challenge him for the prime ministership, into a formal alliance, guaranteeing them senior government posts in return for withdrawing their candidacy.
Had Mr Netanyahu failed, his fall from grace would have been precipitous. Neither Mr Levy, now set to be his foreign minister, nor Mr Eitan, a likely internal security minister, nor many of the other politicians in the Likud's top ranks, much like him. The knives would have been out within days.
But Mr Netanyahu did not fail. As he reminded his supporters daily, he had never failed in any electoral contest he had ever entered. He realised that the reform in the Israeli electoral system, under which voters chose a prime minister on a separate ballot for the first time, had given him the opportunity to "do a Clinton", to sweep to power in his mid-40s on the strength of his convictions, his charisma, and above all his vigour. And he pulled it off.
MR NETANYAHU has had an unusually colourful first 46 years, and Labour certainly did its best to make some of the more embarrassing incidents tell against him. But no matter how much mud was thrown, nothing seemed to stick.
Aware that the ultra-Orthodox community was set to vote for him en masse, his opponents tracked down documents that showed his second wife, Fleur Cates, was a gentile, who converted to Judaism after their civil marriage - a heinous crime in ultra-Orthodox eyes. But not sufficiently heinous to drive the crucial voters away.
In a country where proven patriotism is a prerequisite for high office, the well-fuelled rumour that Mr Netanyahu had at one point considered making his permanent home in the United States seemed guaranteed to dent his support. But it didn't.
Not even when more documents appeared, showing him to have officially Americanised his surname, when studying architecture in the US in the 1970s. to the more pronounceable Netay - a clear sign, surely, of an intention to make a lengthy sojourn in the US Just three weeks before the formal papers appeared, Mr Netanyahu had vehemently denied officially changing his name, insisting in a television interview that he had only informally used a shorter surname for a brief period. The outright lie passed almost unnoticed.
And Mr Netanyahu gained on Mr Peres in the polls, boosted by Hamas suicide bombings that reignited Israeli security fears, inexorably closing down a lead that had once stood at more than 30 per cent.
Now in desperation, his opponents dragged up a supposedly disgruntled 19-year-old daughter, Noa, from his first marriage, studying in the US and apparently disinclined to return home to vote for her father. Reporters in the Hebrew dailies charged Mr Netanyahu with hypocrisy for having himself photographed with his new family, while ignoring the old. But Noa herself denied talk of a breach.
A lengthy profile in the monthly Vanity Fair added more ammunition, describing even his closest friends as being somehow unsure of him, quoting journalists vaguely discussing his unpleasantness and his overdeveloped ego. It revealed such minor nasty details as the fact that his university colleagues "didn't like setting foot in the men's room after he had used it because he was too engrossed in his reading to take proper aim".
And it reported a decidedly tasteless remark he allegedly made to a delegation of visiting American Jewish supporters about the difficulties of fighting an election under the shadow of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. The dead prime minister, he was quoted as saying, was proving "harder to beat dead than alive". The Vanity Fair piece was widely reported in the Hebrew press. Still, Mr Netanyahu marched confidently on.
Mr Rabin's death, of course, could easily have stalled his candidacy from the start. The assassination was carried out by a militant right-winger, of the kind who had been frequently attending Likud political rallies - rallies at which Mr Netanyahu had castigated Mr Rabin's dangerous policies and the rabble had screamed back approvingly that the prime minister was a traitor and a murderer. At the funeral ceremonies, Leah Rabin could barely bring herself to shake Mr Netanyahu's hand, and later said he bore at least partial blame for the murder, for having tailed to root out the extremists and for having fomented the vitriolic atmosphere that led to the assassination.
Mr Netanyahu was battered by these charges, but not beaten. By the time the election campaign had gathered momentum, he had perfected a typically smooth comment on the Rabin killing, saying he felt himself to blame just as to all Israelis surely felt to blame, and that the loss of Mr Rabin was a painful to him as to all his countryfolk.
Finally, belatedly, Labour began attacking his policies. It was all very well offering the mantra of peace with security," the magical solution Mr Netanyahu promised nightly in his TV commercials. But how was he going to achieve it? How could he possibly talk of making peace with Syria if he wasn't prepared to relinquish the Golan Heights? How on earth could he maintain the peace process with the Palestinians if he was deeply reluctant to meets Yasser Arafat, determined to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, unwilling to pull Israeli troops out of Hebron, implacably resistant to Palestinian statehood?
Mr Netanyahu didn't answer in detail. But he gave an indication. The Arabs, he declared, tended to tailor their demands according to the generosity of the governments they were dealing with. His would not be a generous government. Certainly not as generous as Messrs Peres and Rabin had been. The Palestinians, Syrians and others who wanted peace with Israel would lower their sights accordinly, he insisted. The voters loved it.
BENJAMIN "Bibi" Netanyahu is a middle child, the second son of Benzion and Cela Netanyahu, he an outstanding historian, she a lawyer.Fiercely ambitious themselves, his parents nursed strong ambitions for all their children, but especially their first-born Yoni, a warmer, more humane, more open personality than Benjamin. But Yoni Netanyahu was killed 20 years ago this summer, one of the few casualties of Israel's daring hostage rescue at Entebbe Airport, an elite commando leader shot down by an Ugandan soldier.
So the burden of expectation fell on the next son, "Bibi", also an accomplished soldier who served in the same elite unit, was wounded in a less-heralded hostage rescue, and nearly drowned in the Suez Canal on another mission. His parents saw him complete a first degree in architecture and a master's in business administration - both in the United States - while inculcating him with a strong, right-wing ideology.
Father Benzion is a loyalist of the late Zionist revisionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky, mentor of those other Likud hardliners Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who regarded the Labour establishment from which Mr Rabin and Mr Peres sprang as dangerously naive to the extent of Arab hatred for the Jews, and dangerously prone to compromise.
Benzion Netanyhu who last year published a vast and acclaimed study on the origins of the Spanish Inquisition is said to feel that his academic career in Israel was stymied by a Labour establishment that disapproved of his politics. Those, and they are many, who assert that son Benjamin is an "empty vessel" - a pragmatist unwedded to any particular ideology, driven only by personal ambition and a thirst for power - are ignoring Benzion's powerful influence, in a father-and-son relationship that remains strong to this day.
That hawkish orientation underlines why those Arab countries that have come to terms with Israel, and the Western states that are encouraging Middle East reconciliation, are right to regard Mr Netanyahu's accession to power in Israel with considerable disquiet. But as the success of his comeback campaign must have taught even his most arrogant critics by now, he is no fool. He does not wish to turn Israel back into a pariah state, in daily conflict with the Palestinians and neighbouring Arabs, unloved by the West, barely tolerated by the United States.
He still insists, furthermore, that he is committed to the Oslo acords and to the search far a permanent settlement with the Palestinians. So now he has his opportunity, to prove to the sceptics that he can steer a mutually-acceptable path to peace with the Palestinians, to disprove the critics who say he is peddling illusions.
And if, somehow, he can move the peace process on, Benjamin Netanyahu offers one huge advantage over Shimon Peres. His peace moves will be supported by the vast majority of the Israeli electorate, his own backers and those of Mr Peres. Potentially, therefore, his stewardship could heal the divisions in Israeli society that would only have deepened under a continued Peres premiership.
It is quite a challenge for a man who has never even held a cabinet post before. But then Mr Netanyahu relishes a challenge.
There is a moment in his main campaign ad when he catches the eye of a supporter, and gives a simultaneous wave and a trust-me wink. The gesture signals extraordinary confidence and solidity. Don't worry, it says, I'm your man. Everything's going to work out just fine.
It had better.