Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The key to understanding the Israeli right is the issue of Likud versus smaller parties. The
smaller parties argue either that the Likud has become too moderate and thus must be op-
posed or that Likud must accept being infl uenced by themselves as rightist coalition partners.
The Likud's counterargument is that by voting for small parties, rightists are merely putting
the left into power. In the 2009 elections, for example, the Likud obtained twenty-seven seats,
compared with seven seats for the smaller parties. Support from the smaller parties was one
factor in Netanyahu's being able to obtain a parliamentary majority and take offi ce. Once in
power, Likud prime ministers have tried to propitiate small rightist partners but have also been
willing to dare them to leave the rightist coalition and bring it down, which happened in 1992.
Yisrael Beiteinu can be considered a right-of-center party, but its main identity is as a party
of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Still, in considering the size of the Israeli right,
its large base of support should be taken into account.
Likud
The roots of Likud are in Herut, a party founded in 1948 and based on the ideology of Revi-
sionist Zionism, established in the 1920s by Vladimir Jabotinsky. The main tenets of Revision-
ist Zionism in those days were a militant belief that all of the Palestine Mandate and Jordan
should become a Jewish state; that a tough line should be used against the British authorities;
and that large-scale Jewish immigration should begin immediately. The Revisionists, as they
were called, left the World Zionist Congress in 1935 and set up their own institutions, includ-
ing a labor federation, military forces (Irgun, or the IZL), and a health fund.
Once the State of Israel was established, the Revisionists formed the Herut Party and soft-
ened their positions. Still, for many years the Labor Party - dominated establishment treated
Herut like a pariah. Outcaste status only intensifi ed the inner-group loyalty of its supporters,
and Herut quickly became the second-largest party in the Knesset, leading the opposition. It
is part of Israeli political lore that the animosity between Ben-Gurion and Menahem Begin,
the Herut Party leader, was so great that Ben-Gurion refused to call Begin by his name, instead
referring to him only as the “man seated next to Dr. Menahem Bader,” another Herut MK.
A major step out of isolation was the formation of the Gahal bloc with the Liberals, who
formed a moderate, respectable, and middle-class group. Begin was able to increase Herut's
support further by appealing to Mizrahi immigrants who felt ignored by the establishment.
This strategy won the Gahal bloc twenty-six seats in the Knesset in 1965. Then Begin entered
the government during the 1967 war and remained there for two years. In 1973, Gahal merged
with three small groups — the State List, Free Center, and the Land of Israel Movement — to
form the Likud Party.
What mainly brought the groups together was a nationalist ideology that opposed the return
of territory captured in the 1967 war. A centrist party, the Democratic Movement for Change,
took votes from Labor in 1977. That, added to support from the Mizrahim, gave Likud its fi rst
electoral victory, signaling the fi rst regime change in nearly thirty years of independence.
In its fi rst term, Likud signed a peace agreement with Egypt, destroyed Iraq's nuclear reac-
tor, and implemented Project Renewal, a program aimed at developing poor neighborhoods.
On the other hand, infl ation increased dramatically, and the country's economic performance
