Israel: A History

17 | Begin in Power

357 17 BEGIN IN POWE| * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * In the run-up to the May 1977 elections, Israeli television adopted the British practice of the exit poll. As voters left the polling station, they were asked to recast their vote in a sample poll. Through statistical analysis of the results, the pollsters could get an indication of the election results shortly after the polling stations closed. When the television executives saw the exit poll results, they could hardly believe their eyes. The Likud (comprising Gahal and some small parties) had won forty-four seats and the Alignment only thirty-two. At first they thought the exit poll results were wrong, but as the real results flowed in it became increasingly clear that the unbelievable had happened. For the first time since the establishment of the state, Mapai, or the Labor Party, would not be the majority party in forming the government. At eleven that evening tv anchorman Chaim Yavin announced, ‘‘Ladies and gentlemen, an about-turn!’’ coining a Hebrew phrase that took its place in Israeli politics and culture. Likud leader Menachem Begin waited until all the results were in before going with his wife, Aliza, to Likud headquarters, Metzudat Ze£ev (Jabotinsky), where the victory celebrations were already in full swing. Chaim Yavin described the scene, with men in suits and ties replacing the Alignment people and their informal attire; the sloppy style of dress typical of leftists was no more. The building shook to the rhythmic chanting of ‘‘Begin, Begin.’’ Begin put on a yarmulke and intoned the Shehehiyanu blessing (used to celebrate special occasions), thanked his wife, children, and grandchildren, and then quoted from President Lincoln’s second inaugural address: ‘‘With charity for all; with firmness in the right . . .’’ The yarmulke, the blessing, the family references, the use of ceremony were previously unknown in Israeli politics. The anchorman hit the nail on the head when he smilingly remarked, ‘‘We’ll have to get used to a new style.’’ Begin is apparently the only leader in the history of democracies who lost eight elections and won the ninth. When the Etzel was disbanded he founded the Herut party, a fighting opposition to the rule of Mapai and the left. The transition from underground fighter—or, as the international press liked to call him, ‘‘terrorist ’’—to parliamentarian did not gain Begin the public recognition he had hoped for. Until the 1960s his party won fewer than twenty Knesset seats, whereas Mapai won more than forty. Begin had di≈culty surmounting the legitimacy obstacle, and Ben-Gurion did everything he could to prevent him from achieving public trust. The Herut platform, which asserted, ‘‘The Jordan has two banks, and both 358 peace, war, and indecision belong to us’’ (in the words of Jabotinsky, the founding father of Revisionism), aroused fear in Israelis of an irredentist party that would lead the nation into war. Over the years there was a slow, almost undetectable retreat from this maximalist slogan that reduced the claim to the west bank of the Jordan; even this represented an aspiration that did not mandate action. At the time the 1949 lines were the accepted borders. When Gahal was founded in 1965 (as noted, a union of Herut with the liberals, a centrist middle-class party), Begin refused to stop mentioning the territory of the historical Land of Israel (reaching as far as the Jordan), but the liberals viewed this as saber rattling that was out of line with their moderate foreign policy. As a compromise the issue was mentioned in the introduction to the platform as a commitment solely of Herut, not the united party, to the ‘‘integrity of the homeland’’ doctrine. The slow retreat from commitment to Greater Israel represented an acceptance that, for the vast majority of the Israeli public, Greater Israel was a distant dream, not a political platform. As noted before, Ben-Gurion’s objective was to prevent the man whose militant aspirations and ways of operating he considered a danger to Israel’s very existence from being accepted as a legitimate actor on the political stage. ‘‘The man sitting next to Dr. Bader’’ [in the Knesset] is how Ben-Gurion referred to Begin. Ben-Gurion’s phrase ‘‘without Herut and Maki’’ was aimed at preventing the radical right and left from joining coalitions. For several years the Ministry of Defense refused to recognize that Etzel and Lehi veterans were entitled to pensions and allowances equal to those received by their Haganah counterparts. This unjustifiable...