In a video clip from 1978 that was uploaded to YouTube in recent years, Benjamin Netanyahu was documented as presenting the Israeli standpoint in the conflict with the Palestinians in a debate that took place in Boston. At the time, Netanyahu was called Ben Nitay and, at 28 years old, he served as economic consultant in an American company. He was introduced by the debate presenter as a young Israeli graduate of MIT. In fluent, self-confident American English, the young Netanyahu ably presented the Israeli viewpoint as he saw it. He talked about Arabs who refused to recognize the Jewish state, about Palestinians who would prefer to throw the Israelis into the sea and the PLO’s plans to destroy the Zionist movement.

This was probably the first photographed documentation of Netanyahu to be broadcast on television, and it was already clear that we were witnessing a rising political and media star. Netanyahu loved the camera and the camera loved him. He used this skill, together with his political ability, to associate himself with the right person (senior Likud and former Minister Moshe Arens) to win an appointment seven years later (1984) as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. To this very day, Netanyahu is viewed as the best ambassador Israel has ever sent to the UN.

When we view the young Netanyahu in the YouTube clip 36 years after that maiden debate, we immediately discern that the body language, tone of speech and exceptional rhetorical talents have not changed much; they have only improved and professionalized. Today, Netanyahu sports the white hair and a respectable, more serious adult demeanor that befits a man of 65. No longer an economic consultant, today’s Netanyahu is a veteran prime minister of one of the most endangered countries in the world. He stood the night of Sept. 29 before the UN General Assembly in New York, again using the same arguments to try to persuade his audience. Exactly like 36 years ago, and exactly like the hundreds and maybe even thousands of speeches he delivered afterward.

If in the past Netanyahu talked about a PLO that was not willing to recognize the Jewish state but only sought to eliminate it, today he enumerates Hamas, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Iran and the Islamic State (IS). While this is not enough to discount that Israel is, indeed, an endangered state, or to minimalize the ramifications of Abbas’ belligerent speech to the UN General Assembly (Sept. 26), it is enough to raise a few obvious questions: Is Israel’s prime minister still clinging to his basic suspicious stance vis-a-vis the Arabs, despite his statements in recent years about a two-state solution and the necessity for an agreement with the Palestinians? After Netanyahu’s two-state Bar Ilan speech (2009) and the settlement construction freeze in 2010, did he really move from the right to the center, as many analysts thought? Or were they really only false presentations to be issued by Netanyahu when he needed to play for more time, while trying to realize a worldview that did not include a Palestinian state?