The frustrating thing about grand historical moments is that you can't always recognize them for what they are until it's much too late.

I would know: growing up in Israel in the 1990s, I've had my fair share of instances of great import, which didn't always feel like much until the political particles stopped swirling and the entire vista became visible. The newspaper reports announcing the signing of the Oslo Accords, for example, seemed to me, when I read them one hazy morning in 1993, like a crude hoax, a "War of the Worlds"-like stunt, exchanging a Martian invasion for the only slightly less ludicrous notion of peace in the Middle East. And Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995 looked, from my restaurant table two blocks away from the assassin's perch, like an eddy of shoves and shouts and confusion.

Not so Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's first term as Prime Minister. The gorgeous morning after his election in the spring of 1996 nevertheless felt, for anyone milling about Tel Aviv, like the apocalypse had just taken place the previous night. This, croaked some of my more melancholic friends, was the end. First they shoot Rabin and now they elect Bibi, a smug conservative politician whose campaign - orchestrated by Arthur Finklestein, an old Nixon and Reagan political warrior - promised little save for beefheaded toughness on terrorism and a set of retrograde policies that threatened to drain the life out of Oslo's fragile framework. Now that he was voted in, we band of leftists lamented, he would surely elect territorial expansion over the politics of temperance and march us all back in time, back to the days of unending conflict.

It didn't take us too long to realize just how wrong we were. Shortly after sitting in the Prime Minister's chair - the Director General of his office, a former night club bouncer named Avigdor Lieberman, never far away - Bibi signed an agreement promising to withdraw from 80 percent of Hebron, and committed himself to three more territorial redeployments in the near future. His cabinet was furious and stunned: the tough guy from yesterday's campaign spots had transformed, in front of their astonished eyes, into a dovish, reasonable connoisseur of real politic, a highly pragmatic politician willing to make difficult decisions despite potential political ruination.

We on the left were equally as baffled. Was this, we wondered, a brand new Bibi? Or was the sly Likudnik plotting some doomsday political ploy designed to condemn us into perpetual political minority?

Bibi seemed to anticipate the question, and, always a master manipulator of television, staged his definitive answer in front of the cameras. In January of 1997, he reached out to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, shaking his former arch-enemy's hand with U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher standing beatifically by. The following year, there he was again with Arafat, this time under President Bill Clinton's smiling gaze, signing the Wye River Memorandum, which promised more withdrawals and more Palestinian control over the West Bank.

As Jack Rosen, the chairman of the American Council for World Jewry, notes in a helpful recent article, Netanyahu's moves met with overwhelming consensus - his Hebron agreement was approved in the Knesset by a majority of 87-17, a vast improvement over the one-vote majority with which Rabin managed to squeeze by the Oslo Accords. But Bibi's tenure, it was clear, was not long for this world. His opponents on the left still suspected him of harboring secret strongman tendencies, while his former followers on the right openly accused him of treason. Rosen cites a host of right-wing luminaries, including Netanyahu's Likud mentor, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, calling Bibi a traitor and accusing him of great betrayal.

The betrayal, to be sure, was not so great. The same Netanyahu, after all, presided over the criminally idiotic decision to open up the northern exit of the Western Wall tunnel, an archeological site that Bibi, in his trademark bombastic style, labeled "the bedrock of our existence." This act was interpreted by Arafat, no stranger to histrionics, as an attempt to cause the Temple Mount to collapse, and riots immediately ensued, claiming dozens of lives. More seriously, Netanyahu quickly found a way to retreat from most of his early promises, postponing further redeployments and de facto condemning the Wye River Memorandum to a slow and tortuous death.

Less than four years into his term, his administration imploded and his image crushed, Netanyahu fired every arrow in his quiver of excuses. The Palestinians, he said, were to blame for failing to fight terrorism. His coalition was to blame for failing to give him the support he needed. The media were to blame for portraying him as a bumbling and vain incompetent. Ever the master mediator, he was elegant in his accusations. But his message couldn't have been clearer: Benjamin Netanyahu was a victim of circumstance.

A decade later, with Netanyahu once again helming the ship of state, sober observers have no choice but to make a painful admission: he was right.

On the surface, it's easy for anyone in the progressive camp to find many faults with Netanyahu's second coming. As I've already observed in these pages, his recent visit to President Barack Obama displayed no shortage of bad faith, culminating in Netanyahu's silly insistence that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state if negotiations were to succeed. And, again, many on the left saw the election of Netanyahu - this time with Lieberman not as lackey but as foreign minister and essential political ally - as prelude to political Armageddon.

But, now as then, Netanyahu is a more complex creature than most observers give him credit for. Anyone tiring of Bibi's muscular statements and thinly veiled threats to engage Iran should Obama fail to curb that country's nuclear progress need only look at the Israeli Prime Minister's political maneuverings. Rather than appoint a narrow right-wing government that would enable him to carry out his conservative campaign promises, Bibi hurtled himself into a complicated parliamentary minuet, coaxing the Labor Party into the coalition's mix and christening the largest, most precarious cabinet in Israel's history.

Nothing, however, sent a clearer message of ambiguity than Netanyahu's inaugural speech last month. He promised the Palestinians "the authority necessary to rule themselves," but said nothing about statehood. He said Israel did not want to rule the Palestinians, but said nothing about ending the occupation or dismantling settlements. He said peace was possible, but didn't say how he planned to go about achieving it. Rather than charting a political course, Netanyahu sounded as if he was simply enumerating all the options available.

Unfortunately, years of ideological warfare have drained all of the Talmudic zeal out of Israel's Jewish population. Instead of gleefully poring over their Prime Minister's vague, veiled words and trying to divine his true intentions, Israelis, much as they did in 1996, tend to see Bibi in either black or white.

Bibi is a much more colorful bird. Unlike so many of Israel's former leaders, who collapsed under the burden of their own ideological steeliness, he is flexible, transient, nimble. Like Ulrich, the hero of Robert Musil's seminal book, he is the Man Without Qualities, ambivalent and indifferent and constantly in search of meaning.

Others must help him find it. As it is unlikely that he will receive any aid from members of his tattered coalition, the burden lies with Obama and his administration. They must believe that despite Bibi's often intolerable manner - former White House spokesman Joe Lockhart captured the opinion of many in the Clinton administration when he called him "one of the most obnoxious individuals you're going to come into - just a liar and a cheat" - he is capable of change, and reacts best to external stimuli.

Need proof? Watch this video of an American television show from the Seventies. The speaker is credited as Ben Nitay, a 28-year-old, Israeli-born, MIT-educated economic consultant. It's Netanyahu in his chrysalis stage, and as his opponent - a youthful Fouad Ajami - pressures him on his anti-Palestinian views, Nitay's rejection of Palestinian self-determination somehow metamorphoses into entertaining the idea of granting all Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip full Israeli citizenship, a notion deeply reminiscent of the right's much-feared one-state solution.

Be it Ajami or Obama, Netanyahu needs a calm opponent to guide him on the path to self-enlightenment. He needs room and time to outgrow his own considerable arsenal of rhetorical and political tricks. He needs inducement to make hard decisions and face their consequences. Let us give it to him, or risk meeting him again in a decade or so, a man changed for the worse.