JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has retreated to his home and family since his crushing electoral defeat this week, emerging only once for a campaign post mortem, his closest adviser says.
Netanyahu announced his intention to retire from public life for a year within minutes of television exit polls forecasting a landslide victory by Ehud Barak on Monday night. He stepped down as leader of the Likud party, but did not immediately resign from parliament.David Bar-Illan, the outgoing prime minister's closest aide, said Netanyahu has a contract to write a book but has not said what it will be about or when he will begin.
Bar-Illan said it was too early to dismiss the mercurial 49-year-old leader.
"I'm betting he will stay in the Knesset and remain in politics," he said in an interview late Thursday at the prime minister's office, where secretaries leafed through magazines on a quiet morning. "He might go into private business."
Netanyahu has spent the days since the election at home with wife, Sarah, and their two children, Bar-Illan said. He emerged only for a meeting with Likud leaders to discuss the failed campaign and consider the future of the party.
Senior Likud members have said Netanyahu is primarily to blame for his crushing defeat -- and for the Likud dropping from 32 seats in the Knesset to 19. They blame a divisive campaign against Barak, in which Netanyahu accused the Labor party leader of planning to divide Jerusalem with the Palestinians.
Netanyahu was also seen as too close to Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party hugely unpopular with the secular electorate.
Bar-Illan said Netanyahu should be remembered for his contribution to peace.
"He convinced his own followers of the need to exchange land for peace," he said. "Whether this was a necessary evil or a good thing, it doesn't matter, it was the only way to go."
Netanyahu gave up far less land than his Labor party predecessors had planned to concede when they negotiated the Oslo accords with the Palestinians, Bar-Illan said.
"He said he didn't want to have (Oslo) translated into land for terrorism and he insisted on really having peace as the exchange command."
In the process, he persuaded most Likud followers -- once avid believers in retaining all of the biblical land of Israel -- that concessions were the right path.
But not all. Some legislators in Netanyahu's coalition, outraged with concessions he made in October in the U.S.-brokered Wye Accords, bolted and precipitated the early elections.
The hard-liners' strategy backfired. With both major parties backing territorial concession, once-natural Likud constituencies -- ex-Soviet Jews, Sephardic Jews of Middle East background -- found it easier to cross over to Labor.
Barak appealed to voters by hammering away at Netanyahu's record on unemployment and his freezing of the peace process in an unsuccessful effort to win back the defectors.