IN the heady first days following his election victory, exactly a year ago, Benjamin Netanyahu presented himself as a healer. He would work to heal the rifts between Israel and the Arab world, he said in his first speeches and newspaper interviews, and he would work to heal the rifts at home to unite the religious and the secular Jews, the left wingers and the right wingers, the old, the young, the veterans and the immigrants.
It was a near impossible mission. And it is one that the Prime Minister has utterly failed to accomplish.
When he came to power, Israel was at peace with Egypt and Jordan, and edging slowly forward, in a process punctuated by violence and terrorism on both sides, toward a final settlement with the Palestinians. Syria was coming round to an accommodation that would also have bound Lebanon, and thus completed a circle of peace around the Jewish state. Low level diplomatic relations had been established with Tunisia, Morocco, Qatar and Oman. The Arab economic boycott of Israel had been virtually scrapped.
Today, ties with Egypt and Jordan are strained, Damascus and Jerusalem exchange war rhetoric, and the nascent low level links with north Africa and the Gulf principalities have been frozen.
Mr Netanyahu's secretive opening last September of a new entrance to a Jerusalem archaeological tunnel, a move which sparked "Vest Bank violence that left 100 people dead, might possibly be ascribed to spectacular inexperience rather than deliberate provocation. But there can be no doubt that he fully anticipated the consequences of sending the bulldozers in March to start work on a Jewish neighbourhood at Har Homa in East Jerusalem: a complete breakdown in Israeli Palestinian peace talks.
That the Israeli public is hopelessly divided over the peace process is nothing new. It is the central issue in general elections, and the majority one way or the other is never large, the right wing Mr Netanyahu was elected by a margin of less than 1 per cent last year.
But 12 months of Mr Netanyahu's rule have seen the deepening of other internal Israeli rifts. The Prime Minister has made a habit of castigating the print and electronic media, and appears bent on undermining both the legal and academic establishments all of which he seems to perceive as liberal, left leaning elites dominated by Ashekenim (Jews of European origin) Paradoxically, Mr Netanyahu is himself a product of just such an Ashkenazi background.
Perhaps most disturbingly, the Prime Minister is driving a wedge between Israeli and diaspora Jewry, hitherto almost uncritically supportive of the Jewish state.
New legislation that he is supporting would invalidate conversions to Judaism performed in Israel by rabbis from the Conservative and Reform streams of Judaism.
The Bill introduced by Mr Netanyahu's Orthodox coalition partners, will actually affect very few individuals here, but the signal it sends to the diaspora is that non Orthodox Judaism - as practised by the overwhelming majority of Jews in north America, for example - is not good enough, not kosher. Donations from US Jews to Israel are already reported to be falling.