If you were Benjamin Netanyahu, who would you least like to confront as your main rival for the prime ministership three months from now?
Would it be a former prime minister stained by one corruption conviction, on trial in a second corruption case, and facing a possible state appeal against his acquittals in two more? Would it be a political prima donna so undervalued by her own party that it ditched her after she failed to beat you in the last elections? Would it be a former journalist with some credibility in the field of social-justice activism, but no experience in matters of security and defense? Would it be a former TV news anchor with no political experience whatsoever?
No, no, no and no. The electoral threats posed, respectively, by Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, Shelly Yachimovich and Yair Lapid, it can be safely assumed, do not have Netanyahu waking up in the small hours in a cold sweat.
Well, then, would it be arguably the most popular minister in your outgoing government, 11 years younger than you, beloved by the public because of his proven guts to take on the fat cats, who grew up in a working class neighborhood where his elderly mother still lives and who he reportedly calls once a day, one of seven children in a family of immigrants from Libya?
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