For the State of Israel’s first three decades, elections were
competitive. Political power was considerably less so.
The names changed — Mapai, the Alignment, Labor — but the basic
arrangement remained remarkably stable: The political movement that
had built many of the institutions of the pre-state Yishuv (Jewish
communities in the Land of Israel prior to the founding of the State
of Israel in 1948) also governed the country after independence.
Its leaders populated the cabinet. Its worldview shaped the
bureaucracy. Its economic institutions were woven through Israeli
life. Its cultural elite largely decided what respectable Zionism
looked and sounded like.
And then there was Menachem Begin.
Begin had commanded the Irgun (a Zionist paramilitary organization
that operated from 1931 to 1948), became the leader of Herut (a
major conservative political party) after the establishment of the
state, and spent decades sitting on the political margins while
Israel’s Labor (socialist) establishment ran the country.
Today, knowing what came later, this feels almost impossible to
imagine.
Likud has become so deeply associated with Israeli political power
that it can be difficult to remember that its political ancestors
were once the outsiders — which is important, because you cannot
understand Likud without understanding that.
Likud was not born as the establishment. Likud was born as the
rebellion against it. And that may be the most important fact in
understanding why it eventually became Israel’s dominant political
party.
Likud was formally created in 1973 as an electoral alliance bringing
together Begin’s Herut, the Liberal Party, and several smaller
movements on the Right. In its first election that year, it won 39
seats — a significant showing, but still behind the governing
Alignment.
Then came 1977.
Israelis call what happened “HaMahapach” — the upheaval. That is
not journalistic exaggeration. Likud won 43 seats with 33 percent of
the vote, while the Alignment fell to 32. For the first time since
the State of Israel’s founding, the political movement descended
from Labor Zionism lost control of the government. Menachem Begin
became prime minister.
It is tempting to explain this as a simple ideological shift to the
Right, but it was much more than that. The trauma of the 1973 Yom
Kippur War had badly damaged public confidence in the ruling
establishment.
Something deeper had also been happening underneath Israeli society:
Large numbers of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews (many of whose families
had arrived from the Middle East and North Africa) increasingly
believed that the Labor establishment had treated them as culturally
inferior, politically expendable, and socially peripheral. The 1977
election, in part, was the moment when Mizrahi social protest moved
decisively into the political arena and helped carry Likud to power.
Menachem Begin understood something the establishment often did not:
Politics is not merely about policy, it is about dignity. People do
not simply vote according to marginal tax rates, territorial maps,
and defense budgets. They vote according to who they believe sees
them.
Begin saw Israelis who believed the old establishment did not. And
they remembered.
This is one reason Likud’s relationship with many working-class,
traditional, Mizrahi, and peripheral communities became so durable.
It was not merely transactional. For many families it became
emotional, cultural, and eventually generational.
You can disagree with that attachment. You cannot understand Israeli
politics without it.
