A 4X4 van took former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu up a bumpy light brown rocky track to a hilltop between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement town of Ma'aleh Adumim.
Netanyahu chose that site, called E-1, as the first stop in his drive to replace the incumbent Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The plan for E-1, overlooking the Jerusalem-Ma'aleh Adumim road, is controversial. The planners hoped that it would help link Jerusalem and Ma'aleh Adumim and plug one of the gaps in the ring of Jewish communities surrounding the predominantly Arab East Jerusalem.
Among the Palestinians and around the world that plan caused concern partly because it would disrupt contiguity between the Palestinians in the northern and in southern West Bank. If East Jerusalem becomes an enclave surrounded by Jewish communities, it would be more difficult to establish it as the Palestinian state's viable future capital.
International, especially US pressure, led the government to freeze work at E-1 and the issue thus had the ingredients for the fight Netanyahu was picking with Sharon.
In rolled up shirtsleeves, the E-1 plan beside him, Netanyahu complained that the Palestinians were building east of Jerusalem.
"What we need to do is to break this siege by building here. Sharon won't build here. I will," he declared.
Netanyahu said that he had facilitated construction at E-1 when he was prime minister. Natan Sharansky, standing beside him in a battered army hat, built the roads when he was housing minister.
Construction of a four-lane highway stopped six months ago because of US pressure, Ma'aleh Adumim municipality's director-general Eli Har-Nir told reporters. Now, instead of building homes, public services, hotels and recreation facilities over a 325-acre area, only a police station will be built, he noted.
The situation is absurd, Netanyahu declared. Sharon "uprooted thousands of houses" in the Gaza Strip settlements and at the same time "is preventing the construction of one house here, on Jerusalem's outskirts. He is abandoning Jerusalem's Eastern Gate to the Palestinians! It must stop and we shall stop it," he declared.
The Americans oppose settlement here, reporters noted. "So what?" asked Netanyahu.
Washington also opposed construction of the Har Homa neighborhood between Bethlehem and Jerusalem.
"I just [went ahead and] built there ... There are thousands of housing units there ... Nobody can tell us to freeze building in our capital," he argued.
The tough talk is designed to win the votes of the 155,000 registered Likud members, many of whom are furious at Sharon for withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, all the more so since he is doing so unilaterally after a party referendum overwhelmingly voted against that.
The Likud's Central Committee is to vote on September 26 on whether to advance party primaries. Polls show that the overwhelming majority there opposes Sharon.
If Netanyahu has his way, and the primaries are advanced, he could be party leader by the end of November. He would then strive for early elections, his spokesman Amir Eilat said.
Netanyahu was prime minister from May 1999 to June 1996 and served as Sharon's finance minister until he quit on August 7.
He formally announced his candidacy for party leader last week in Tel Aviv at an event that his aides said would be a press conference but that turned out to be an election rally.
Dozens of fans filled the hall, cheered him, chanted his nickname "Bibi, Bibi", and at least once answered a reporter's question instead of him.
Netanyahu was widely considered to have been a disaster as prime minister. He said that he has changed.
"I gained experience. I learnt. I drew lessons. I am ready," he said.
The reaction in some of Wednesday's newspapers was: Really?
The rally "brought back the old Bibi", wrote Yedioth Ahronoth's commentator, Sima Kadmon.
Netanyahu said that he had restored security and that for two-and-a-half years there was not one suicide bombing. "Israel's citizens felt secure," he stated.
"One might think that during his days Tel Aviv was Geneva," Kadmon sneered.
He talked of fighting corruption. "I cannot accept that my state would be a state of baksheesh."
The Ha'aretz newspaper's Yossi Verter noted that the Knesset Members sitting on the dais beside him included Ehud Yatom who, as a senior Shabak security service commander, had stoned to death a Palestinian highjacker that was in his custody. Knesset Member Naomi Blumenthal who is on trial for alleged bribery and Knesset Member Michael Gorolovsky who was accused of a voting fraud.
Police twice recommended charging Netanyahu with corruption, Kadmon noted. The attorney general rejected those recommendations.
Netanyahu was asked about it at the press conference. He ignored the questions.
Meanwhile Sharon's people are gearing up for the fight. Sharon's supporters noted that under his leadership the Likud Knesset faction grew from 19 seats to 40 seats, commanding one-third of the Knesset.
"It is the first time that a party that is in power, that [still] has more than a year to lead the state, is ready to relinquish power because of the personal ambition of one of its former minister's, out of hatred and a desire for revenge," Sharon said in a radio interview.
The implicit warning was: If I am forced out of office and elections are held, the Likud may not win that many seats. Some of the present Knesset members will not be reelected; Many people who have jobs because of their Likud connections may lose them. You, who want to oust me, better think again.
Earlier this week Sharon told Channel 10 TV that Netanyahu is "not a responsible person ... In every instance of pressure ... he panics and loses his wits .... Here [in this job] you need quiet, peace of mind and strong nerves. He doesn't have it."
Sharon might survive, especially if the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip produces quiet on that front. He may survive if Netanyahu fears that he is about to lose.
A recent public opinion poll published in Yedioth Ahronoth showed that 51 percent of the people who said that they had voted Likud - voters, not just dues paying party members - opposed the move to depose Sharon.
"Whom do you think should head the government," a representative sample of 601 Likud voters was asked.
Fifty-one percent said Sharon, 26 percent said Netanyahu. The others said neither, or refused to answer.
If Sharon sees that he is about to lose in the Likud, he might quit and form a new party. He would surely take some of the Likud voters with him and attract members of the centrist secular Shinui Party.
However, Israel's political history showed such moves to be a mistake, and his own short-lived experience in a list that he had formed in the 1970s and called Slomzion is a case in point. However, this time it might be different because Sharon is the incumbent prime minister.
Some Likud diehards were so vehement that all they cared about was to see him go.
In a car that followed Netanyahu to E-1, Knesset Member Ayoub Kara angrily looked at the Yedioth Ahronoth poll among 'people who did not count'.
"The Likud members will determine ... and we have an absolute majority," Kara said.
"So we won't have mandates. We will expel him!" he declared.
"One thousand firemen won't extinguish the flames in the Likud," observed Eitan Haber in Yedioth Ahronoth's editorial column.
Analysis: Netanyahu: US opposes? So what?
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