Word: likud
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Which way now? In this year of elections that could redirect history--in Israel, Russia, the U.S.--the first has been decided. Israelis have picked a Prime Minister in conservative 46-year-old Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. And the change in policies that his country will now pursue will have consequences affecting half the globe. Sometimes statesmen stumble blindly over an epochal crossroads they do not know is there. Others are given the chance to see the fork in the road ahead and decide deliberately which way to go. Folly, wrote historian Barbara Tuchman, is when leaders knowingly choose...
...countries boast an electorate as passionately political and committed to their views as Israel's. Most voters knew long before the campaign where they stood on the peace process, on Labor's path vs. Likud's. The election turned not on some seismic slide from left to right but on the choices made by the 6% to 7% of perennially undecided, known as the floating vote, who are swayed more by emotion than ideology. Netanyahu won because he better captured their cautious mood after the suicide-bomb slaughter of 59 men, women and children in a shattering Hamas rampage over...
...will simply lower their expectations when confronted by in-your-face showdowns. Instead he might drive despairing Palestinians, who have profited even less than Israelis by the peace process so far, into battle. It is a possibility that Benny Begin, Menachem's son and another hardheaded prospect for the Likud government, concedes is real. A serious breach in the peace process would reinvigorate Hamas; its popular standing waned as rapprochement advanced, but its bombs have already claimed a kind of victory for those who think violence is the only road to Palestinian statehood...
JERUSALEM: Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu will be declared Israel's next Prime Minister with 50.4 percent of the vote, defeating Prime Minister Shimon Peres, according to final unofficial results released Friday by the Central Election Commission. The results were delayed by the extraordinarily close results and 144,000 absentee ballots had to be counted to break what was a virtual tie between Netanyahu and Peres. After Friday's results, Netanyahu will have 45 days to put together a coalition government. "He will form a coalition with right wing and centrist parties," says TIME's Lisa Beyer. "He can easily count...
JERUSALEM: Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu's political future awaits a Friday count of some 154,000 absentee ballots. With 99.9 percent of the vote counted, Netanyahu maintains a razor-thin lead of a few thousand votes over Prime Minister Shimon Peres. In an election many saw as a referendum on the country's peace process, Israel appears almost evenly divided. An unofficial count shows Netanyahu with 50.3 percent of the vote to 49.7 percent for Peres. Israel's course toward peace has been pursued aggressively by both Peres and his Labor Party predecessor, Yitzak Rabin, assassinated last November. Netanyahu...