Aluf Benn

Two years after returning to power, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is enmeshed in a web of onerous constraints and seeking a way out. Polls show his popularity plunging, and his Likud party's brand has been squeezed between Kadima and Yisrael Beiteinu.

Netanyahu, unlike Mubarak, does not face hundreds of thousands of demonstrators demanding his departure, but the political atmosphere here is oppressive.

In Israel, it's not the masses who will rise up against the regime, but the opposite; the government will shake off the checks and balances restraining its power.

Egypt has taken advantage of recent unrest situation and redeployed their army in the demilitarized Sinai. No future government in Cairo will return this force to the other side of Suez.

Upon his return to power, Netanyahu embarked on manifesting this vision. At the Presidential Conference in October 2009, he posed a challenge - to do away with global dependence on oil.

The 'diplomatic holding action' that Israel is conducting has enjoyed partial success, but the world is gradually becoming accustomed to the idea that Palestine will join the family of nations this summer.

To date Iran has managed to deter Israel against military action, but will that continue to hold true in 2011?

The defense establishment favors reviving the Syrian track as the most effective way of breaking out of isolation and easing Israel's strategic difficulties.

Instead of initiating and leading, Netanyahu will engage in fruitless holding actions until he falls from power.

What do the three Likud ministers who rebelled against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and voted against allocations to Orthodox men have in common? All three live in Tel Aviv.

The prime minister would do well to listen to the tape of Meir and Nixon and ask himself what he can do to avoid repeating her mistakes.

The leaked cables reveal that the Israeli-Iranian conflict is about more than the nuclear issue. It is a sweeping ideological conflict. And history teaches that such conflicts end only when one side has been knocked out.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Haifa fire department spokesman Hezi Levy have been filling our television screens but others in the chain of command have disappeared.

President Obama emerges from the WikiLeaks cables as a weak leader, whose good intentions dissipate in the face of the stubbornness of his Middle Eastern counterparts.

The prime minister cannot control demography. But he can focus on integrating Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox into the labor market instead of wasting his time in arguments with Obama.

The story is framed in a way that tends to be to Israel's detriment, because those who compare Israel to Goliath and the Palestinians to David are secretly hoping for a victory of the shepherd over the warrior.

Only one of the prime minister's potential decisions would fundamentally change Israel's relations with the Palestinians and Syrians: removing the settlements.

The prospect of bringing together the secular elites of both countries - who share the dream, and the challenges, of integrating into the West, as well as the anxiety over religious ascendance - is an opportunity.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is approaching the point of irrelevance, from which his government will slide into the next elections without anything to show for the current term.

The long-term significance of the internal struggle Netanyahu's government is spearheading is with the oppression of the Arabs, right-wing power is guaranteed for decades.

Lieberman chose the 'crisis' over the settlement construction freeze to push the prime minister against a wall, to raise doubts about his reliability.

How can Netanyahu refrain from an action to stop Hitler's heir, Ahmadinejad, when the year is already 1939, if not 1940?

Netanyahu must not wait; if he tries to please everyone, he will slide down the slippery slope until he is kicked out of office once again.

The cosy relationship between a minister awaiting sentence for perjury, the defense minister and the chief of the Mossad.

Benjamin Netanyahu is no different than his predecessors; he delays decisions on the two central issues on his table: countering the Iranian threat and the future of the West Bank.