Summary
The May 1977 Israeli election in which the Revisionist Zionists under Menachem Begin came to power after half a century outside it, ending Labor Zionist hegemony — in The Jewish State: A Century Later a watershed that marked the emergence of a truly competitive system and Israel’s first successful transfer of power (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 2212-2514).
Details
- Dowty’s Chapter 6 traces the upheaval to the erosion of ideology: governmental services replacing party functions, the gap between a secularized, mainly Eastern European socialist elite and a significantly more traditional, much of it Middle Eastern, public, the 1967 war’s revival of dormant territorial issues, and the post-1973 malaise that cast a shadow over Labor’s aura of invincibility (lines 2212-2351).
- Its demographic core, on Dowty’s figures: an estimated 35 percent of non-European Jews voted for the Likud in 1969, 45 percent in 1973, 56 percent in 1977 and 69 percent in 1981 (lines 2212-2351).
- The result was magnified by the Democratic Movement for Change under Yigael Yadin, whose fifteen seats came primarily at Labor’s expense; this, more than Likud’s own electoral success, put Likud in a position to form a government in 1977, though given prevailing trends it would have happened one or two elections later in any event (lines 2352-2514).
- The election legitimated the Likud in the public mind: on its eve 61 percent of one sample still claimed to be closest to the Labor position on foreign policy, against only 30 percent for Likud, but immediately after the election the same question drew only 38 percent support for the Alignment’s foreign policy while identification with the Likud rose to 53 percent (lines 2352-2514).
- A literature search recorded in Chapter 6’s notes uncovered only one clear prediction of the upheaval: David Nahmias, in 1976, pointed out that the right and the religious parties together were only nine seats short of a majority and that “such a coalition would end the political dominance of Labour” (lines 2800-2948).
- Ian S. Lustick’s account agrees on the fact — discredited Labor was voted out in 1977 and Begin became prime minister at the head of a Likud coalition with the National Religious Party — in his telling dominated by Gush Emunim (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 2, lines 1990-2010).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Likud, Menachem Begin, Democratic Movement for Change, Gush Emunim, Labor Zionism