A couple of months before Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination, I was interviewing Dan Meridor, a former Likud minister of justice and one of the more thoughtful “Young Princes”–as the new generation of Likud leaders is known–when the telephone rang.

Binyamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, the Likud leader, was on the telephone. For the next ten minutes the two debated the political impact of the Likud’s association with the growing tide of settler opposition to the Rabin government’s diplomacy with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Meridor argued forcefully against the Likud’s identification with the settlers, bemoaning the fact that Likud banners were prominent in televised pictures of major traffic jams caused by demonstrators blocking Israel’s major highways. His message to Bibi was that outrageous settler behavior was a political liability to the Likud, not an asset.

I could not hear Bibi’s responses, but it was clear that he was not won over to Meridor’s point of view.