Word: likud
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...Bush's dilemma, of course, is minor when compared with Sharon's. Six months ago, the Likud leader won a landslide election victory on promises to end the intifada by getting tough. Yet Sunday's shooting attack that wounded eight Israelis in downtown Tel Aviv was a dramatic reminder that Israelis are essentially as insecure now as when they elected Sharon. And the current situation, in which one or two Israelis are killed every week in the West Bank or Gaza may be politically unsustainable in the long run for the Israeli government. After all, it was the deaths...
...Conflict between a Bush administration and a Likud Party-led government over settlements certainly has a familiar ring - the same issue provoked a public fallout between the first Bush administration and the government of Yitzhak Shamir, in which Washington threatened to withhold financial aid if Israel went ahead with settlement construction. This time around, both sides will be inclined to fight shy of a public confrontation, but there will inevitably be some tough diplomatic bargaining behind closed doors...
...simply a reversion to the old situation, which favors the two biggest parties, Likud and Labor. That upsets many Israelis, because the fact remains that many voters turned away from the bigger parties when given the option to vote for a party that more accurately expressed their concerns. So now, instead of paying more heed to those concerns, the bigger parties have engineered a situation where those people once again have no choice but to vote for Likud or Labor, or else face the prospect of wasting their vote...
...Still, Sharon has drawn many of those small parties into his government. The new law means that if they try bring down his coalition, they would face new elections under the old system, which favors Likud and Labor. And that makes for a more stable coalition right away...
...poles of the ideological spectrum. Even in tranquil times, the most consistent incubator of Israeli political leaders has been the military - the preeminent institution of national unity and security. This is the backdrop to Wednesday's inauguration of Ariel Sharon's national unity government, comprising not only his own Likud party and a number of smaller right-wing and center-right groups, but also the dovish Labor party he beat in last month's election, and also the country's third-largest party, the ultra-Orthodox Shas...