He tried to keep two very different balls in the air, covertly assuring the far right that he was against withdrawal from the West Bank under the Oslo accords, while promising the centre that he would not abandon the peace process.The prime minister succeeded until the Wye accords in October. He has to unite the nationalist right behind him as the man who will fight Mr Arafat every step of the way. He needs to frighten religious and ultra-orthodox Israelis with the belief that, whatever his failings, he is better than Labour’s secular elite.Mr Netanyahu’s problem is that he starts the election campaign burdened by the legacy of two-and-a-half years in power during which he has earned the distrust of every political party in Israel. But he won by only 15,000 votes out of 3 million, and this after Islamic militants had killed more than 60 Israelis by suicide bombs.This time the Israeli leader has a more difficult task. He hopes to win the election on 17 May by uniting Israel’s religious and extreme nationalist voters against the threat from the secular left and the Palestinians.
No other politician has his ability to whip up the fears of Israeli voters as they go to the polls.
It worked in the last elections in 1996, when Mr Netanyahu accused the Labour Party of selling out to Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and planning to divide Jerusalem. Then he took off the vest and laid it ceremonially on the floor
His message was simple: no enemies on the right. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, pointed to his bullet-proof vest at a rally of his right-wing Likud party “Are you all members of Likud?” he asked them “You bet we are,” they roared back. IT WAS a gesture typical of the man. Indeed, the controllers might seem to be tempting fate: in November it will be used to monitor the intensity of the Leonid meteor shower, which may reach a 33-year high.. Ground tracking suggests that debris is particularly concentrated at that height.
It would of course be bad luck if Argos was itself a victim of space junk. There are known to be about 6,000 items of space junk larger than 10cm – but smaller pieces are just as dangerous to huge projects such as the International Space Station.The new satellite, called Argos, will circle Earth for three years at an altitude of 516 miles in a region heavily used by commercial, scientific and government spacecraft. “We will be able to tell whether the debris is uniformly distributed or in “clouds” around the Earth, and even whether there’s a ring of it around the Earth.”The current data about space junk were gathered by satellite between 1984 and 1990, but are now hopelessly out of date. His team designed the instrument that will search for the debris.The satellite will also try to distinguish between the amount of space junk left behind since the Soviet Union put Sputnik into space in 1957 and cometary dust and rocks left by the passage of celestial objects.”This is the first active experiment where you can separate these two phenomena,” said John Simpson, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. The Hubble Space Telescope and the Space Shuttle have both been hit – though not seriously – by space junk. In the Shuttle’s case, an orbiting fleck of paint left a visible pit in one of its windows.The problem is worsening too because collisions between pieces of junk in turn produce more potentially lethal missiles.”Many of these particles are produced by collisions between larger debris objects, and so information about these particles is important for understanding the whole debris population in Earth orbit,” said Bruce McKibben, the senior scientist at the University of Chicago’s laboratory for astrophysics and space research.