From Arafat to Mansour Abbas, Likud focuses on delegitimizing Jewish politicians because of their ties with with Arabs – and Arab politicians simply for being Arab. Then as now, there is an ironic gap between Netanyahu's messages and his actual policy

In Likud's main campaign ad in the 1996 election, 30 years ago, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat played a starring role. Acting on the advice of American campaign adviser Arthur Finkelstein, who believed that a good campaign needs a villain, the campaign focused on the ultimate bad guy: the PLO leader, "the man with hair on his face," as Menachem Begin put it, who wore a kaffiyeh and had outsmarted Rabin and Peres on his way to conquer Jerusalem.