Word: fractious
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Barak predicted he would win that special election, earning himself a "new mandate" to push ahead with his plans for a peace deal. Winning won't gain him much, though, because the same fractious and fragmented Knesset remains in place. In two months, Barak could find himself back to square one, trying to cobble together a coalition with right-wing and religious politicians without alienating the doves in his own party...
...Netanyahu's dramatic comeback bid was derailed by the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, which was prepared to support him once again for prime minister, but not at its own expense. The party's 17 seats give it a kingmaking - and -breaking - role in the fractious legislature, and that's powerful leverage for a minority party. But polls indicate that it would lose between four and six seats to Likud in a parliamentary election right now. Both parties draw support primarily from immigrants from Arab countries, and analysts predict that in an election focused almost exclusively on peace and security issues...
...Many of those same voters know that clamping down harder on Palestinians doesn't solve the problem, and ultimately they'll be back at the peace table. And Israel's fractious and complicated parliamentary system allows a prime minister to win by a landslide but even then struggle to maintain a workable majority government (as Barak did). Now, Netanyahu looks set to return to the same booby-trapped office. But even having to govern via a traditionally fractious Israeli coalition government won't stop Netanyahu from keeping his foot firmly jammed on the brake of the peace process...
...been said that in America during the fractious 1850s, before the Civil War, Walt Whitman entertained the wistful, urgent conceit that his great poem "Leaves of Grass" might save the Union. It would show Americans that despite their divisions they were one great nation. Montaigne, almost three centuries earlier, worked a variation on the theme. Rising above dogma and abstraction, he would pursue the general human truth by studying himself - and such generalized self-knowledge, the recognition of their human selves, might relieve people of their inclination to kill one another for religious reasons...
...Republican Club, whose dues-paying membership has swelled from 30 to 200 this year, may play a crucial role in the fractious presidential contest, according to Porter...