Word: likud
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Begin won an initial vote of confidence in the 120-seat Knesset with a tenuous majority. He can count on the support of 63 members: 43 from his own Likud bloc, 16 from Israel's two right-wing religious parties, former General Ariel Sharon and a colleague who represent the conservative Shlomzion Party, new Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and one independent. Begin had hoped to build a sturdier and broader-based coalition by getting the support of the centrist, 15-member Democratic Movement for Change. Talks between the parties bogged down on foreign policy. To the dismay...
Apart from the generals, Begin's Cabinet is mostly lackluster. Finance Minister Simcha Ehrlich, for instance, is not an economist but a manufacturer of optical goods. He may well have a hard time coping with Israel's rampaging inflation and convincing the country to accept a controversial Likud program to counter it with planned unemployment...
...sweeping arms-limitation proposals, carried to Moscow by Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (the State Department itself should have foreseen this). Nor did the agency predict the political demise last month of Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny. Carter was annoyed at the CIA's failure to forecast the Likud coalition's upset victory in last month's Israeli election. In China, the CIA seemed surprised by the rise of Chairman Hua Kuo-feng, the vilification of Madame Mao and the rehabilitation of Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing. "The wide-scope stuff tends to be soft...
...shape of Likud's occupation policies-and the shape of the new government itself-awaits the lengthy consultations that will start this week when Begin formally accepts President Ephraim Katzir's invitation to form a new government. Begin picked up more political support last week: retired Major General Ariel Sharon, a hard-line nationalist, announced that the two Knesset members of his Shlomzion party would support the new government...
...Yigael Yadin's Democratic Movement for Change, which won 15 seats at the expense of the Labor alignment. Yadin, who wants the Foreign Minister's portfolio that Begin offered to Moshe Dayan (TIME, June 6), last week stressed that serious ideological differences still separate the D.M.C. and Likud: "They say there should be Israeli sovereignty between the sea and the River Jordan, and we say there should be territorial compromise for peace. The question is: What will happen within the next year or two?" On the West Bank, Arabs are wondering the same thing. "We want a solution...