Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Israel's prime minister and
co-winner of the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1978, Menahem Begin
(1913-1992), on the CBS
current affairs program
Face
the Nation,
June 1982. (Getty
Images / Image Bank.)
The alternation between Labor and Likud prevailed between 1977 and 2003. Thus, Rabin
won the 1992 elections; Peres took over when Rabin was assassinated in 1995; Peres lost the 1996
elections and was replaced by the fi rst third-generation Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu served as prime minister from 1996 to 1999. Deep confl icts in the Likud Party
helped lead to the victory of Netanyahu's contemporary and Rabin's protégé, Ehud Barak, in
1999. The failure of the Oslo peace process then brought into offi ce the Likud's Ariel Sharon
in 2001.
This complex history refl ects the simple duality of a struggle between two parties for power.
Each party had a set of more and of less reliable potential coalition partners. The parties to the
left of center favored Labor, those to the right of center were more willing to join with Likud,
and the religious parties basically held the balance. Still, even added together, the two main
parties did not have more than about 60 percent of the total Knesset seats in the 1981, 1984,
1988, and 1992 elections. Their share has fallen even more since then with the rise of several
medium-sized parties.
The 1990s saw an attempt to institutionalize the two-main-party system by the direct elec-
tion of prime minister, and it was under those rules that the 1996 and 1999 elections were held.
This experiment was ultimately deemed unsatisfactory, however, because a division of control
over the prime minister's offi ce and the Knesset made Israelis worry about the government's
ability to act decisively. On the fi rst occasion, Labor won the most seats in the Knesset, and
Likud's Netanyahu became prime minister. On the second occasion, Labor's Barak won the
most Knesset seats, but Labor still held only a little more than 20 percent of them, the lowest
total ever for a ruling party. Afterward, the country's return to a single vote for a party list to
elect the Knesset, with the prime minister thus being chosen indirectly, enjoyed overwhelming
support.
