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Israel's Political Earthquake
EHUD BARAK won a landslide victory over Benjamin Netanyahu in the Israeli elections. Twenty minutes after the ballots closed, Netanyahu - known to all as Bibi - conceded defeat and resigned his leadership of the Likud party.
For Likud, it was a double defeat. Not only did Netanyahu lose the prime ministerial race, but the Likud party suffered heavy losses, losing a third of their Knesset seats. In response to Netanyahu's resignation, his supporters collapsed in tears of despair, and within an hour the hall where hundreds of activists had gathered was deserted.
Television reporters, who have relentlessly attacked Bibi's government since its inception, could hardly suppress their elation at Netanyahu's defeat. Tens of thousands of Barak supporters spontaneously gathered in the square where the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered, to express their joy at Netanyahu's defeat, and their hopes for a bright, peaceful future.
In the Knesset itself, the most significant results are the Likud's collapse and the meteoric rise of Shas, the Sephardi ultra-orthodox party. Likud dropped from 32 Knesset seats to 19, while Shas vastly increased its strength from ten seats to 17, transforming itself into a major party - the third largest in the Knesset. The other 'surprise' in these elections was Shinui, the newly-formed secular, right-wing, anti-religious coercion party, winning six seats. The reason for Shinui's popularity is that it was the only party taking a strong, unapologetic stance against religious coercion.
Netanyahu's defeat was the result of a combination of factors. His fraudulent, blatantly opportunistic style dragged Israeli politics into new depths of depravity. Moreover, with its grudging acceptance of the Oslo accords, Likud lost its ideological base, blurring any distinction between itself and Labour. These developments led to mass defections by key Likud activists, including Dan Meridor, Itzik Mordechai, Benny Begin and David Levy. But more than anything else, Netanyahu's defeat was the result of three years of recession that hit Likud supporters (being mainly workers) hardest.
The election campaign and results reflect deepening divisions within Israeli society between the secular and religious. Netanyahu leaned on the religious parties to keep Likud politicians, who were his potential rivals, out of government. As a result, the ultra-orthodox parties enjoyed enormous power in Netanyahu's government, controlling the ministries of the interior, education, housing, etc. Millions of shekels of public money flowed into the religious parties' coffers. This inflamed secular Jews' resentment of the ultra-orthodox (who do not work, pay taxes or do military service, and whose institutions are entirely state funded). Shas used state money for its own welfare system in the poorer neighbourhoods, filling for its supporters a gap left by the crumbling state welfare system. At a time of economic crisis, a section of the workers rejecting Western capitalist society (and in the absence of a socialist alternative), looked to Shas as an alternative. This explains their enormous gains in these elections.
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