Word: knesset
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...more weeks or months, even if he no longer had an effective mandate to govern. Day after day, in an unseemly bid to withstand an opposition call for early elections, Begin's ministers scrambled to buy another vote or two in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset...
...avail. Leaders of the opposition, principally the Labor Party candidate for Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, plotted a parliamentary assault aimed at finishing off the government. To avoid such a showdown, the Begin Cabinet voted Sunday to ask the Knesset to call an early election on July 7, four months ahead of schedule. Begin's government had sounded its finale in the kind of unruly Cabinet session that had become a hallmark of his 3½ years in office. The issue had originally seemed relatively benign: a pay raise for the country's 65,000 teachers, approved earlier...
...resigned from the Cabinet once before in opposition to the Camp David peace accords, was not about to relent. When the Cabinet finally voted to give the teachers the increase, he made good on his threat and tendered his resignation. His defection and that of four other Knesset colleagues reduced Begin's coalition to 58 votes in the 120-seat Knesset, three short of the 61 needed to carry a majority. "I am not disappointed," Begin unconvincingly remarked later. "This is a democracy...
...their Cabinet battle. Either way, it would signify almost certain doom for the Begin government. If Hurvitz walked out, two other members of his tiny Rafi Party and two or three other political allies would be expected to follow and thus reduce Begin's majority of 63 Knesset members to fewer than 60, not enough to survive a no-confidence motion. A Hammer walkout would be even more devastating, since he would be expected to take with him most or all of the twelve-member delegation of the National Religious Party. Another danger was the highly credible threat that...
...artilleryman in the British Army's Jewish Brigade, Hurvitz turned his hand to investment. He bought into a farm cooperative, moved on to one small dairy products company after another and demonstrated an unusual knack for turning unprofitable ventures into money earners. Says his brother Amos, a Knesset member of the opposition Labor Party: "I really don't know how Yigal came to this kind of thing. His major mistake as Finance Minister was to take the job in the first place...