INTRO
It’s election season in Israel. And if you didn’t already know that, you probably don’t live in Israel.
Israelis vote a lot. Too much, if you ask me. On October 27th, Israel will hold its 26th election since the state was founded in 1948. That’s 26 elections in 78 years. And here’s my hot take: that’s too many elections.
On paper, a Knesset term lasts four years. In practice, the quirks of Israel’s system mean an election can be called early for almost any reason, and voters keep getting sent back to the ballot box. In fact, this year’s vote is the first since the 1980s that wasn’t called early.
Lucky for me, I’m the kind of geek who finds elections fascinating, especially Israeli ones. So today I’m borrowing a move from my podcast rebbe, Bill Simmons, and doing a countdown: the Top Eight Israeli Elections of All Time. For each one, I’ll give you the context, the story, the outcome, and why it made the list. Buckle up.
First, my criteria.
Number one: historical significance. Every election matters the year it happens. I’m looking for elections whose consequences are still shaping the Jewish state today.
Number two: drama. Close calls, upsets, twists and turns. The kind of thing that ties political pundits in knots as they try to explain what just happened.
Number three: the wow factor. Shocking outcomes, absurd results, controversial tactics. Anything that leaves you asking, “Wait, did that really just happen?”
One more thing before we start. To really appreciate some of these picks, you need a basic sense of how Israeli elections work. So we’re breaking the mold today: instead of saving Five Fast Facts for the end, we’re doing them up front.
FIVE FAST FACTS
Number one: Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, has 120 seats. That number is a nod to the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah, the Great Assembly of 120 sages, prophets and scribes who led the Jewish people about 2,500 years ago, during the Second Temple period. In the U.S. Congress, each seat represents a specific state or district. Israel has no local seats at all. The whole country is one national district, and every vote counts toward the entire Knesset.
Number two: Israelis don’t vote for people. They vote for parties. A party’s share of the vote becomes its share of the seats. Win 25% of the vote, and you get 25% of the Knesset: 30 seats out of 120. There is one catch: the electoral threshold. It started at 1%, and over the years it’s climbed to 3.25%. If a party falls below that line, it gets nothing.
Number three: Before the election, every party submits a ranked list of candidates, and seats are filled from the top down. Win ten seats, and the first ten people on the list go to the Knesset. Win nine, and the first nine go, while number ten spends the next four years telling people at parties how he came thisclose.
Number four… actually, this one’s important enough that I’m counting it twice.
Numbers four and five: An Israeli election isn’t over on election day. It’s over when someone forms a government, which means lining up the support of at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 members. If a single party wins 61 seats on its own, that’s it. Government formed. Done.
Number of times that’s happened in Israel’s history? Zero.
Instead, every Israeli government has been a coalition: a group of parties pooling their seats to reach the magic number, 61. The job of building that coalition usually goes to the leader of the biggest party, though not always. If that person is likable enough, savvy enough, or pushy enough to get to 61, he becomes Prime Minister. If not, someone else gets a shot. And if they can’t do it either, the whole country goes back to the polls.
Let’s pause, because that was a lot. Short version: 120 seats. Whoever gets 61 of them behind him “forms a government” and becomes Prime Minister. (Or her, but with one notable exception, it’s been him.)
Okay. Ready? Let’s do this. The Top Eight Israeli Elections of All Time.
Number 8 – 1949. The One That Started It All.
We’re starting at the foundation: the State of Israel’s first-ever election. And the wildest part is the timing. Israel held a national election while it was still fighting for its survival. The War of Independence is only just winding down, the country doesn’t have final borders, and Ben-Gurion looks around and says, “Perfect. Let’s do democracy.”
Election day is January 25th, 1949. The government declares a national holiday, businesses close, and Israelis pour into the streets, thrilled to finally vote for the leaders of their own democratic, Jewish state. Loudspeakers blare from rallies in every town square as 21 parties compete for a place in the first Knesset.
(NERD CORNER: So many of Israel’s citizens in 1949 were new immigrants who couldn’t read Hebrew yet that each party’s ballot was marked with just one or two Hebrew letters to make voting easier. It was supposed to be temporary. Israelis still vote that way today.)
Of roughly 500,000 eligible voters, more than 430,000 show up. That’s a turnout of nearly 90%.
The result? Mapai, Ben-Gurion’s socialist labor party, wins by a mile: 46 seats. He builds a broad coalition to reach 61, including the religious Zionists, the Progressives, the Mizrahim, and (a detail people often forget) an Arab party. And just like that, David Ben-Gurion becomes Israel’s first Prime Minister.
Who’s not in the coalition? The party that came in second, Mapam. Ben-Gurion was a socialist. Mapam’s leader, Meir Ya’ari, was… more socialist. A major Zionist leader in his own right, he thought Ben-Gurion’s socialism didn’t go far enough, and he had a much warmer view of Stalin and the Soviet Union. So Israel’s two big socialist parties spend the first Knesset on opposite sides of the aisle.
Oh, and Menachem Begin was on that ballot too. His party, Herut, came in fourth. Don’t worry, we’ll be spending plenty of time with him later.
So why only number eight? Because 1949 isn’t flashy. Ben-Gurion was already running the country, so in practical terms, not much changes. But it makes the list because it locks Israel’s election rules and quirks into place. Nothing else on this countdown happens the way it does without it.
It also launches a dynasty nobody saw coming. Mapai, and Labor, the party it eventually becomes, would lead every Israeli government for almost 30 years.
More on that later. First, number seven.
The Election of 1981: Begin versus Peres, round 2. The Grudge Match.
This isn’t the election where Menachem Begin first takes power. That one’s coming later in the countdown, and trust me, it’s a doozy. But 1981 is the sequel. It’s the election where Begin proves his win wasn’t a fluke, and where ethnic identity goes from an undercurrent in Israeli politics to the main event.
Begin is the incumbent, and he has a historic first term to run on, above all the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt.
But political memories are short. The glow of the treaty fades, the economy slides toward crisis, and Begin’s Likud party starts losing support fast. Rather than keep bleeding, Begin backs early elections, set for June 30th, 1981.
As the campaign heats up, Shimon Peres and the Alignment, HaMa’arach, a left-wing alliance led by Labor, are way ahead in the polls. Then, three weeks before election day, Begin makes a dramatic move: he green-lights Operation Opera, an airstrike that destroys Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor.
Osirak deserves much more than a sidebar, so the full story is linked in the show notes. For our purposes, it gives Begin a real bump. But it’s not the moment people remember from this election. That moment is a joke told at a rally, or more precisely, Begin’s response to it.
Here’s what happened.
At an Alignment rally in Tel Aviv, a comedian named Dudu Topaz takes the stage and mocks Likud supporters as “chach-chachim,” the kind of people who barely make it into combat units.
If you don’t know the term, “chach-chach” is a slur for Mizrahi Jews, Israelis whose families came from the Middle East and North Africa. It was already street slang, but Topaz put it on a national stage. The very next night, Likud holds its own rally in the same square, and Begin gives one of the most famous speeches in Israeli political history.
The link is in the show notes. It’s in Hebrew with subtitles, and you need to watch it. His voice, his timing, the way he plays the crowd… it’s a masterclass. If you can, pause this episode and watch it now.
Here’s what Begin says:
“Until this morning, I never heard the word ‘Chach-chachim’ and I didn’t know what it meant. But listen. When that guy… what’s his name…”
And he glances down at his notes for the name. Devastating. Absolutely brutal shade.
“When Dudu Topaz said those words of ignorance and mean spirit, the crowd that stood here last night cheered!
The crowd erupts. Boos, hisses, the works.
“Now I’ll tell Dudu Topaz who he was talking about…”
Begin then tells the story of Meir Feinstein and Moshe Barzani: one an Ashkenazi Jew from Europe, the other a Mizrahi Jew from Iraq, both fighters in the Jewish underground before the state was founded. Both were captured by the British and sentenced to death, and together they gave their lives in one final act of defiance.
Then Begin brings it home, with a line that changes the 1981 election and every election since. I have to play this one for you.
Audio: (Ashkenazi? Iraqi? Yehudim! Achim! Lochamim!)
“Ashkenazi? Iraqi? Jews. Brothers. Warriors.”
I still get chills.
With that speech, Begin turns a shift in voting patterns into a question of identity. It doesn’t matter that he himself is Ashkenazi. In that moment, he becomes the champion of Mizrahi Jews and seals a bond between Likud and the Mizrahi community that still holds. Look at Likud’s base in 2026 and you’re looking at a coalition whose emotional core was forged by one bad joke at a rally in 1981. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. But only slight.
As for the result: with overwhelming Mizrahi support and just enough Ashkenazi votes, Begin wins by less than one percent. Likud takes 48 seats to the Alignment’s 47. One seat. But it’s enough.
So how much of that win was policy, and how much was pure “You called us WHAT?” Hard to say. But intentionally or not, Begin put the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide front and center, and Mizrahi voters have been central to deciding Israeli elections ever since. That’s why 1981 lands at number seven.
Number 6: 2021: The Impossible Lineup. AKA, Anyone but Bibi.
This one might win the award for wildest.
Democracy is good. Free and fair elections are good. But Israel between 2019 and 2021 proved that democracy, like ice cream, is something you can have too much of.
Israel held four elections in two years. Four. That made it the democracy with the most frequent elections in the world. Not a record you want.
It was exhausting. An endless loop of campaigning, voting, failing to form a government, and starting over. Until finally, after the 2021 election, the record stops skipping. At least for a while.
Here are the players on the court in 2019, when things start going off the rails.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Bibi, ten years into the longest consecutive run of any Israeli Prime Minister. He goes into this mess dogged by corruption allegations and facing an increasingly loud opposition.
And Benny Gantz, former IDF Chief of Staff and head of the centrist Blue and White party. The first two elections are basically Benny versus Bibi, Blue and White versus Likud, and they’re neck and neck. After the second deadlock, Bibi floats a unity government: the two parties join forces and maybe even share power. Gantz publicly refuses. He says he’ll never serve under a Prime Minister facing indictment.
Six months later, after election number three, that’s exactly what he does. Neither man can form a government alone, so Benny and Bibi agree to a rotation: Bibi serves as Prime Minister for the first half of the term, then hands over to Gantz. Except it never gets that far. Did Bibi ever really intend to hand over the keys? We’ll leave that one to the pundits. Either way, the government collapses in a budget standoff (I’ll spare you the details), the Knesset dissolves about nine months after election number three, and we’re headed to election number four.
By now it’s 2021, and Bibi has stretched his ten years in office to twelve while the election drama rages around him.
Election number four is in March 2021. Likud does respectably, winning 30 seats, but Bibi can’t get to 61. So the mandate passes to the runner-up: Yair Lapid and his centrist Yesh Atid party.
Lapid reads the moment. After two years of chaos, what the country needs most is stability. He has to form a government. Any government. As long as it doesn’t include Bibi.
So he does something unimaginable.
Lapid teams up with Naftali Bennett, head of the right-wing Yamina party (“Yamina” literally means “rightward”), and together they assemble a coalition that spans the entire political map. Eight parties, from the settler right to the secular left. Even the Arab party Ra’am signs on, the first and so far only time an independent Arab party has joined an Israeli governing coalition.
These people should not share a locker room. They have exactly one thing in common: keeping Benjamin Netanyahu out of the Prime Minister’s office. And for the moment, that’s enough.
Lapid and Bennett agree to rotate, and Bennett goes first. His party won just seven seats out of 120, which makes him the Prime Minister with the smallest party in Israeli history. (Another record you don’t necessarily want.) And just like that, Israel gets a break from the endless election cycle.
Sort of. This coalition of strange bedfellows doesn’t last long. In 2022 the government falls apart, Israel heads back to the polls, and Bibi ends up right back in the big chair.
I’m still wondering if I’ve ranked this one too low. Listen to number five and decide for yourself.
1992: The Comeback. Rabin’s Last Ride
Everybody loves a good rivalry, especially between two guys on the same team. Think Shaq and Kobe: winning together at the highest level while barely able to stand each other.
The greatest same-team rivalry in Israeli politics? Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, both of the Labor party. These two icons of the Israeli left feuded, and I mean feuded, through decades of working side by side.
Rabin draws first blood. In 1974, he edges out Peres in a tight race to become Prime Minister. But in 1977, a personal scandal forces him to step aside, and Peres takes over the party. He’ll lead it for the next 15 years.
Unfortunately for Peres, they’re not glamorous years. Long story short: Peres leads Labor through an epic dry spell.
Then comes 1992, and with it, the first primary election in Israeli history.
Until then, a committee in each party picked its leader and ranked its candidate list. But by ‘92, reform is in the air, and Labor takes a big swing for democracy: a primary in which every party member gets a vote on who captains the ship.
And once again, Rabin beats Peres. He becomes party chairman and Labor’s candidate for Prime Minister.
It’s a personal comeback for Rabin, and it fuels a comeback for Labor. With Rabin at the top of the list, Labor wins 44 seats, its first decisive victory in nearly 20 years.
But the comeback is only a small part of why 1992 matters. The real significance is what comes next.
Rabin is a rare figure in Israeli politics: a security hawk who might also be the one to make peace. And he tries. The result is the Oslo Accords and everything that follows: the hope, the despair, and the grief.
Fifteen months after the election, something once unthinkable happens in broad daylight. Rabin shakes hands with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, and peace feels closer than ever.
Two years later, the story ends in the most devastating way imaginable. Rabin is assassinated by a fellow Jew as he leaves a peace rally. The Oslo process limps along for a few more years, then fades. The promise of peace never materializes.
You can’t tell the story of Israel in the 1990s without those events, and none of them happen without the comeback of 1992. That’s why it’s number five.
#4: 2026 – The Live One.
Okay, I know this sounds a little absurd. I’m putting this year’s election on the list without knowing how it ends. We’re calling highlights on a play that hasn’t happened yet.
But however it plays out, I think it’s likely to earn its spot. There’s so much riding on it that I might even be underrating it.
Bibi is back for another run, and he’s carrying a lot of baggage: the controversial judicial overhaul he tried to push through the Knesset a few years ago, and the corruption trial he’s in the middle of right now. But all of that pales next to the issue dominating this election: October 7th and the war with Hamas.
Israel is deeply divided over the war. Some credit Bibi with strength and resolve. Others blame him for letting the attack happen in the first place, and criticize what they see as a mismanaged war in Gaza that has badly damaged Israel’s standing in the world.
That said, if Bibi is anything, he’s resilient. He’s been Prime Minister for almost 19 years. To put that in perspective, Benjamin Netanyahu has led Israel for nearly a quarter of its existence. But this year could be different, because there’s a new party in town.
I mean that literally. The party was founded just last fall, specifically to take on Bibi in this election. It’s called Yashar!, which means “straight,” “upright,” or “honest.” A not-so-subtle jab at a Prime Minister on trial for corruption.
And I love this: the exclamation point is officially part of the name. Yashar! I’ll do my best to deliver it that way. (Very deep cut, but it reminds me of the Jewish singer Yehuda! If you know what I’m talking about, welcome to a very, very niche club.)
Here’s what makes this race so thrilling: Gadi Eisenkot, the head of Yashar!, has a real shot. He and his party have spent much of late summer and early fall beating Bibi in the polls.
Eisenkot is fairly new to politics, but his credentials are serious. He spent four decades in uniform and became IDF Chief of Staff under Bibi in 2015. After October 7th, he joined the emergency war cabinet overseeing Israel’s military response, until he resigned over what he saw as a lack of strategy.
There’s something else you should know about Eisenkot, because it shapes how a lot of Israelis see him. In December 2023, two months into the war, while he was sitting in that war cabinet, his son Gal was killed in Jabalia, in northern Gaza. Gal was 25, a reservist. Within days of getting up from shiva, Eisenkot was back in the cabinet room. In many countries, the people who send soldiers to war and the families whose children fight it live in different worlds. In Israel, that line is thinner than almost anywhere, and Eisenkot may be the starkest example of it. So when he criticizes how this war has been run, many Israelis don’t hear a politician scoring points. They hear a father who has paid the highest price there is.
In this campaign, Eisenkot has positioned himself as the anti-Bibi, and he fits the part. He’s soft-spoken, with working-class roots and unpolished English. He doesn’t have Bibi’s American education, and he certainly doesn’t have Bibi’s relationship with the President of the United States.
Is that a strength? A weakness? Or is it just different, at a moment when a lot of Israelis want something different?
There’s one more reason a Yashar! win would be historic. Eisenkot is the 66-year-old son of Moroccan immigrants. If he wins, he’ll be Israel’s first Mizrahi Prime Minister.
Depending on how it goes, this could end up a top-two election.
So which is it? Will Eisenkot and Yashar! end the Netanyahu era? Or is this another mirage, like every “Bibi Is Finally Finished” story before it?
Full disclosure: I hate predictions. Hate them. But I’m going out on a limb anyway. If I were a betting man, I’d bet on Eisenkot.
So there it is: Eisenkot wins. It’s on tape, and we’ll play it back on the post-election show.
But that’s for later. On to number three.
2015 – The Gevalt Election
We’re into the top three, and we’re kicking it off with a twist ending and one of the most controversial election-day plays in Israeli history.
2015 lands right in the middle of Netanyahu’s longest stretch in office. He’s six years in, with six more to go before he’s ousted. But of course, nobody knows that yet.
At the time, his hold on power looks shaky. Two rivals, Tzipi Livni of Hatnua and Isaac Herzog of Labor, join forces to form the Zionist Union. The plan: beat Netanyahu, then take turns as Prime Minister. As election day approaches, their odds look good.
By noon on election day, the numbers are leaning toward a Zionist Union win. Then, at 12:23 p.m., Bibi goes on Facebook with an urgent plea to his voters.
Here’s what he says:
“The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves. Left-wing NGOs are bringing them in buses… Go out to the polling station, bring your friends and your family, and vote to close the gap between us and Labor. With your help, and with God’s help, we will establish a national government that will protect the State of Israel.”
Did you catch that line? “Arab voters are heading to the polls in droves.” Bibi’s strategy is to fire up his base by holding up Arab voters as a threat.
Cynical? Yes. Divisive? Absolutely. Effective? You betcha. Israelis even have a name for this kind of last-minute panic play: a gevalt campaign.
By the end of the day, the exit polls show the Zionist Union’s lead has vanished. Likud is running even. It looks like a nail-biter, maybe even a tie.
Then the actual votes are counted, and it turns out the polls weren’t just wrong. They were way off. It isn’t a tie. It isn’t even close. Likud runs away with it, 30 seats to the Zionist Union’s 24.
The next morning, you could practically hear every pundit in Israel hemming and hawing, trying to explain how they’d gotten it so wrong.
Moral of the story: take polls with a grain of salt. Or a tablespoon. Better yet, ignore them entirely. They’ll only break your heart.
#2: 1996: The Photo Finish
I went back and forth on whether this one should be number one. It has a twist ending and the narrowest margin of victory in Israeli history. But what really pushes it toward the top is the context.
It’s the first time Israel directly elects its Prime Minister. Voters get two ballots: one for a party, to fill the Knesset, and a separate one for Prime Minister. The experiment doesn’t last, and by 2003, Israel is back to the original system.
The backdrop is pure trauma. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated just months earlier, in November 1995, and a wave of bus bombings and terror attacks tore through the winter and spring.
Shimon Peres, Rabin’s successor at the head of Labor, starts way ahead in the polls. Public sympathy is enormous, and he vows to carry on the peace process he and Rabin built together.
But the terror attacks make people question the wisdom, or at least the practicality, of that peace process, and Peres’s support starts to slip.
On the other side is Likud’s new chairman: a young, fresh-faced, 46-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu, running for Prime Minister for the first time. He pitches himself as the answer to Israel’s security problems, a strategy that will serve him well for the next 30 years.
Peres still leads. By the time the polls close, his lead has narrowed, but it looks like it’ll hold. The country goes to bed all but sure that Peres and Labor have won.
They’re half right.
Labor does win the Knesset vote. But remember, there’s a second ballot. Around 3 a.m., as the last votes come in, Peres’s lead starts to shrink… and shrink… and shrink, until it’s gone. Netanyahu wins by about 30,000 votes, less than one percent. The smallest margin of victory in Israeli history.
(A quick what-if, because this is one of the big ones. What if it had gone the other way? What if Peres had gotten the mandate to carry Oslo forward his way? What if Bibi had lost his very first race for Prime Minister? I’m not saying Israel would be better or worse. But it would be different. That one election set the stage for the next 30 years.)
And the man at the center, the one who slipped through a 30,000-vote crack in the door? He basically never left. He’s now Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister.
In terms of impact on today’s politics, 1996 might be number one. But I’m keeping it at number two, because… well, you’ll see.
Before we get into number 1, I want to recognize two honorable mentions.
Honorable Mention #1 – the election of 1984.
I’ve brought up rotating Prime Ministers a few times now. Bennett and Lapid in 2021. Bibi and Benny in 2020. Herzog and Livni’s plan in 2015. And you’ve all just accepted it as a normal thing.
Can we stop and acknowledge how bizarre that is? Two Prime Ministers splitting one term? Rivals from different parties handing the job back and forth? It’s ridiculous. And the first time it happened, the one that set the precedent, might be the strangest of all.
1984: Shimon Peres’s Labor versus Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud. Labor technically wins, but Peres can’t get to 61. So he agrees to split the term with Shamir. Peres serves as Prime Minister for two years, then hands the keys to the country to his political rival.
I wasn’t in the room when that deal got made, but I can picture the whole Knesset looking around like, “Wait, are we actually doing this?”
They did. And it became an accepted part of Israeli politics. That’s why 1984 earns an honorable mention.
Honorable Mention #2: Shimon Peres.
Peres has come up a lot in this countdown, so before we wrap up, a word about his electoral legacy.
He was a giant of Israeli history and the consummate statesman. He holds the record as Israel’s longest-serving Knesset member: more than 47 years.
He was also a perennial election loser, which is a tough thing to be in politics.
As Michael Koplow, a past guest on Unpacking Israeli History, put it: “Shimon Peres was good at many things, but his chosen profession was not one of them.”
Harsh, but fair. Peres led Labor into five national elections. He lost four outright. The fifth was 1984, which he technically won but couldn’t form a government from. And that’s not counting his losses to Rabin inside his own party.
I’m not saying this to be cruel. If anything, it makes me admire him more. He did so much for his country while losing, over and over.
And you’ll be glad to know he finally won one in 2007, when the Knesset elected him President of Israel, nearly half a century after he first took his seat.
Ok, it’s time for number one. The wildest election in Israeli history is:
1977: Upheaval
If you know anything about Israeli election history, you saw this one coming from a mile away. Ask anyone to name the most significant, most iconic, most paradigm-shifting election in Israel’s history, and you’ll get one answer: 1977.
(Not that anyone has ever actually done an Israeli election countdown before. I’m pretty sure we’re the first, and possibly the only people who’d want to. This is peak Unpacking Israeli History nerdiness. We own this court.)
Here’s what you need to know.
Before 1977, Israel was governed by the socialist, Labor Zionist left. Actually, “governed” isn’t strong enough. Dominated. Owned.
It was that way under Levi Eshkol in the ’60s. It was that way when Ben-Gurion won the first election in 1949. It was that way before Israel was even a state.
On the other side, for all those years, stood Menachem Begin, the eternal leader of the right-wing opposition. Begin had led a party in every single election since the founding of the state. That means by 1977, he’d run for Prime Minister eight times and lost all eight.
In 1977, he’s at the top of the Likud list once again. And this time, Labor doesn’t lose because of any one thing. It loses because it’s getting hit from every direction at once.
There’s the Yom Kippur War. The 1973 war shattered the sense of invincibility Israelis had carried since the Six-Day War, and with it, their faith in the Labor government that was supposed to have seen it coming. Golda Meir resigned in its aftermath.
There’s a string of scandals. Labor’s pick to run the Bank of Israel, Asher Yadlin, goes to prison for bribery. Then Golda’s successor, Yitzhak Rabin, steps aside when it comes out that his wife kept a U.S. bank account, which was illegal for Israelis at the time. Shimon Peres takes over the party just weeks before the election.
There’s inflation, climbing fast. And there’s fatigue. After 29 years of one party running the government, the unions, the health funds and a big share of the country’s jobs, a lot of Israelis feel like they’re living in a company town.
Then Labor’s own base walks out. A brand-new centrist party called Dash, led by former IDF Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin (who was also, I can’t make this up, a famous archaeologist), runs on clean government and wins 15 seats, mostly from secular, middle-class, Ashkenazi voters who had always been Labor’s bread and butter.
Labor also loses its oldest partner: the religious Zionists of the National Religious Party, who sat in nearly every Labor government since 1948, but whose younger generation now sees Begin as the leader who shares their vision for Judea and Samaria. The final break is in December 1976. A welcoming ceremony for Israel’s first F-15 fighter jets runs into Shabbat, the NRP refuses to back the government in the no-confidence vote that follows, Rabin fires its ministers, and the coalition collapses, which is how this election got called in the first place.
But the biggest shift of all comes from Mizrahi voters. For decades, most of them had voted Labor. Now immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, and their children, are ready to push back against what they see as 30 years of being treated like second-class citizens.
Mizrahim make up close to half the population, and in 1977 they use that power like never before. They move to Likud en masse.
So Labor gets squeezed from both sides: Mizrahi voters moving right to Begin, and its establishment voters moving to the center. Nearly three decades of Labor rule end in a single night, and it isn’t close. Labor collapses from 51 seats to 32. Likud wins 43. Menachem Begin becomes the first person ever to beat Labor, and Shimon Peres becomes the first Labor leader ever to lose.
It’s a tectonic shift, the end of an era nobody saw coming. On live television, legendary anchor Chaim Yavin captures the nation’s shock:
“K’nireh, lo pachot me’asher mahapach. Mahapach chal b’Yisrael.”
“It appears to be nothing less than an upheaval. An upheaval has taken place in Israel.”
That one word, mahapach, “upheaval,” becomes the name for the whole event. Israelis don’t call it “the 1977 election” or “Begin’s first win.” It’s just the Mahapach. The Upheaval.
And it’s the right word, because the country is never the same. Within months, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat lands in Jerusalem. Begin brings the Haredi parties into government for the first time in decades, launching the right-religious partnership that’s still the backbone of Likud coalitions today. Settlement in Judea and Samaria takes off. And Menachem Begin, the man Ben-Gurion once refused to even call by name in the Knesset, is Prime Minister of Israel.
That, friends, is my number one.
And that does it for the official Unpacking Israeli History countdown of the Top Eight Israeli Elections of All Time. Thanks for being here. We’ll see you on the other side of October 27th, to unpack whatever’s about to go down.