THE YOUNG Israeli diplomat was visibly flustered, tie askew, forehead glistening. A senior American official had just chewed him out inside the State Department and he had no idea what to say about it to the reporters clamouring for comment outside. He blinked helplessly into their cameras, struggling for words. It is a long time since the world has seen Binyamin Netanyahu as flummoxed as he was in 1982 when, as Israel's deputy ambassador to Washington, he was called on to explain why his country's tanks were rolling north through Lebanon. The unease he showed in a recent television interview about a corruption scandal surrounding some German submarines, while palpable, was not on the same scale.
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