Word: shamir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...even though the final figures shifted slightly three days later to give Labor 44 seats to Likud's 41. The rival political leaders largely kept their reactions private, but there was no mistaking their emotional response: dismay on the part of Peres and elation from Shamir. Said Peres to a friend: "It's all over...
Since neither of the two large groups even approached a majority in the 120-member Knesset, Shamir and Peres immediately began to woo the leaders of 13 smaller parties in the hope of forming a coalition that could muster at least 61 seats. Day after day, potential allies trooped in to state their conditions to Shamir and Peres. Rarely had the process seemed so fractured and complex. Though Labor had won the most seats, Likud appeared to be in a slightly better position to piece together a government because the splinter parties that are ideologically closer to Likud fared better...
...worrisome, the party's continuing inability to appeal to the Sephardic Jewish immigrants from North Africa. Labor's failure to do better was all the more glaring because Peres' opponent was not, as in 1977 and 1981, the impassioned Menachem Begin but the untried and colorless Shamir. The outcome confirmed that the Sephardim, who now constitute a majority of Israel's population, have become a potent political force. Many of them hold a grudge against Labor for supposedly neglecting their needs during the 1950s and 1960s...
...mathematical realities thus forced Peres and Shamir to focus their attention on three parties: Weizman's three-seat Yahad; the National Religious Party, a mainstream Orthodox group whose four members devoutly believe that the West Bank belongs to Israel; and the Sephardic Torah Guardians, a rigidly Orthodox organization that won four seats...
...withdrew its guards at the Israeli liaison office in a Beirut suburb last week, as a means of forcing Jerusalem to close the building and bring home the 30 officials who worked there. Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami had been pressing Israel for months to shut the office, but Shamir had refused to abandon what amounted to the last shred of the May 17, 1983, withdrawal agreement negotiated by his predecessor Begin...