Has Bibi Been in Power "Forever?"

Menachem Begin, credit

A whole generation of Israelis has grown up knowing just one Prime Minister, and with some short exceptions, two generations or more only know only one ruling party, the Likud.

DAVID BEN-GURION declares
Israel’s independence in Tel Aviv in 1948.
(photo credit:FRED CSASZNIK)
Jerusalem Post

There's a great irony here, because for the first nineteen 19 years of the State of Israel, it was a given that the Herut Party, the forerunner and main party/element of the Likud were forced on the sidelines of power and treated like political/ideological lepers. In the panic of 1967 before the war started, drafting Menachem Begin into the government to make an emergency "national unity government" was more cosmetic than anything else. The State of Israel had been threatened with annihilation, had absolutely no allies, and the ruling Labor Party didn't want to see itself alone as the ship went down.

Some time before the 1977 Knesset Elections, I remember reading an article that stated that Israel was considered one of the best examples of democracy in the world, with one minor, sic, problem. There had only been one ruling party, Labor, the entire nineteen 19 years of its existence.

At that time, like today, the Leftist Labor supporters, and even some to the Left of them, controlled not only the government, but the media and education, which they considered as their historic right.

Prime Minister Binyamin Bibi Netanyahu
credit

And here we are, almost forty 40 years after that surprise upset victory of Likud which propelled Menachem Begin, whom founding/first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion considered his mortal enemy, into the role as Israel's Prime Minister, and Binyamin Netanyahu has just surpassed Ben-Gurion's record of 2,793 days – or seven years and 236 days in office.

For someone of my generation, this still amazes me. Honestly, when my husband and I made aliyah in 1970, who would have thought that there would be a time when Israel's Left would be marginalized and in the opposition? If anyone would have even hinted at such a possibility, he or she would have been mocked and belittled.

So, when we now talk of a more Jewish State of Israel and Israeli Sovereignty in all of the Land we possess, are we crazy and delusional, or are we visionaries?