Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Generally, each government minister is responsible for deciding and formulating the poli-
cies of just one ministry. But when a decision needs to be made about an issue of extreme
importance, all government ministers discuss and decide on it, and the ministry in charge of
the matter oversees and ratifi es implementation.
The defense minister is almost always an experienced former general or someone with ex-
pertise in military affairs. On one of the rare occasions that this was not the case, when former
Histadrut chair Amir Peretz held the job during the 2006 confl ict with Hizballah, Peretz's poor
performance undermined the war effort. Being fi nance minister is usually not a stepping stone
to the top job, but Netanyahu's good performance in that post, from 2003 to 2005, did help
pave the way for his return to be prime minister.
Prime Ministers and Political Parties
During Israel's fi rst fi fteen years, politics was dominated by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
He was the only real contender for the post, except when he temporarily withdrew from
politics. It should be noted, however, that even with his tremendous power, he often was in
confl ict with his own Labor Party (then called Mapai) and did not always win battles. During
these periods of confl ict he enjoyed the loyalty of two second-generation Israelis, Shimon Peres
and Moshe Dayan. When Ben-Gurion formed his own small party, Rafi , for several years,
Peres and Dayan joined him.
When Ben-Gurion stepped aside for a time, he was replaced by his sometime foreign min-
ister Moshe Sharett. When Ben-Gurion retired in 1963, his colleagues Levi Eshkol and, after
Eshkol's death, Golda Meir became prime minister. To some extent, it can be said that all four
of these leaders governed in partnership with the Labor Party. In later years, prime ministers
became more independent of such constraints. Israeli-born Yitzhak Rabin, who became prime
minister in 1974, was the fi rst to do so from the second generation of leaders and was the fi rst
former career military man to hold the post. His protégé, Ehud Barak, was the only other for-
mer general ever to be prime minister.
Each of these early leaders was brought down by a mainly non-electoral event. Sharett was
removed by Ben-Gurion, who felt his own strong hand was needed to manage the growing
friction with Egypt; Eshkol died in offi ce but had been regarded as weak; Meir was discredited
by failures immediately prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973; Rabin left offi ce when his wife,
in a technical violation of a then-existing law, left a foreign bank account open after Rabin left
his post as ambassador to the United States.
While these early prime ministers all had vulnerabilities, the Labor Party's dominance com-
bined with the fi rst generation's solidarity — not excluding Ben-Gurion's various disputes with
Labor — ensured electoral victory. The party's leader became prime minister.
The 1977 election brought the fi rst great transition. The victory of the sixty-four-year-old
Menahem Begin marked a break from Labor Party, socialist, and Ashkenazic control. Al-
though Begin was from Poland, a large portion of his voter base was Mizrahi. His election
also attested, however, to the continued authority of the founding generation. Like most of his
predecessors, a perceived partial failure — in Begin's case, the Lebanon War of 1982 — along
 
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