Word: knesset
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Knesset had convened only a few minutes earlier to debate a measure of some consequence: a motion by the small (sixmember) opposition Shai Party to dissolve parliament and hold early elections. At the horseshoe-shaped Cabinet table, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, 66, complained to colleagues that he suddenly felt warm. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief and loosened his tie. When Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin asked him if he was all right, Begin weakly replied: "Get a doctor...
...Prime Minister Menachem Begin last week, implicitly conceding what most Israelis now expect: Begin's shaky coalition government will probably not survive until the next scheduled elections in October 1981. Indeed, there is a remote chance that the end could come as early as this week. The Knesset is scheduled to debate a motion, supported by the opposition Labor Party, to dissolve itself and hold new elections within four months...
Begin has overcome similar motions in the past, but last week his coalition suffered the unexpected defections of two members from the small party called the Democratic Movement. That left the Prime Minister with a majority of only three seats in the 120-member Knesset. Two of those votes belong to his former Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and his recently resigned Defense Minister Ezer Weizman. Both men might well vote for early elections. In a speech to Haifa University graduates last week, Dayan declared, "The time has come for us to send the ball back into the people...
According to the Knesset Immigration Committee, 2,000 Israelis are now emigrating each month, mostly to the U.S. About 25,000 are expected to leave this year, 10,000 more than in 1979. If the trend continues, more Jews soon will be departing from Israel than arriving from other countries. Already 400,000 Israeli Jews - one in nine - are living...
...speech to the Knesset last week, Prime Minister Begin denounced the West Bank bombings as "crimes of the gravest type" and promised that those responsible would be brought to justice. But by his intransigence on the question of Palestinian autonomy and his policy of coddling the extremist Jewish settlers and their backers, Begin himself had contributed to the climate of violence. As the Jerusalem Post said last week, the bombings were part of "a process whose roots lie in the concept of perpetual Jewish rule in the West Bank, but whose shoots are the denial of coexistence...