Herut
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- For other uses, see Herut (disambiguation).
Herut (Hebrew: חרות "Freedom") was the political party of the Revisionist Zionist movement in Israel. It was conservative and nationalistic and became the main opposition to the Israeli Labour Party. Herut was led from its inception in 1948 by Menachem Begin and after 1983 by Yitzhak Shamir. In 1965, Herut joined with the Liberal Party of Israel to form the Gahal bloc though it retained its own organization within the new party and dominated the new formation. In 1973, Gahal merged with other right wing parties to form Likud, but again, Herut maintained a dominant role in the new party and the main leaders of Likud, including Begin and his successors such as Yitzhak Shamir have been Herut leaders. In 1988 the parties in the Likud coalition, including Herut, formally merged and Herut ended its independent existence.
Herut started out as a medium sized party with 14 seats in the first Israeli Knesset. It was considered to be outside the Israeli consensus, and David Ben-Gurion famously said he was willing to add any party to the coalition "except Herut and Maki," Maki being the Israeli Communist party at the time. It gradually grew, feeding on feelings of resentment against the leading Labour party, mainly among new Sephardi immigrants. In 1967, already being a part of Gahal which had 22 Knesset members, it joined the national unity government created during the Six Day War. It remained in the government for another term, but quit in 1970 due to disagreement over the Rogers plan [1]. It remained an opposition party until, now part of the Likud, seizing power in the 1977 Israeli elections. Herut remained the leading faction of the Likud electoral coalition until 1988 when Likud's factions formally dissolved and Likud became a unitary political party.
In 1998, after Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ceded territory to the Palestinians in the Wye accords, Herut split off from the Likud in an act of protest. Led by Benny Begin (Menachem Begin's son), Michael Kleiner and David Re'em, Herut: The National Movement was politically supported by former Herut leader and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as well as by notible Revisionist intellectuals like Shmuel Katz.
Herut participated in the elections of 1999 joining forces with Moledet and Tkuma to form the National Union list, with Benny Begin at number one and the list's candidate for the post of Prime Minister. Begin withdrew his candidacy for Prime Ministership three days before the election to help Netanyahu in the tough competition against Labor candidate Ehud Barak, but it didn't help and the Israeli right wing suffered one of its worst fiascos. National Union received only four seats in the Knesset and facing lack of popular support for Herut, Benny Begin resigned from political life shortly after the election. He was quoted as saying that he had become a "crowd leader with no crowds". Michael Kleiner replaced Begin as chairman of Herut and after several months, left the National Union and began reestablishing Herut as an independent party.
In 2003, Herut made the first attempt to run for the Knesset on its own since the early 1960s. For its ballot it chose the Hebrew letters נץ, meaning "hawk", and the slogan "the 'hawkest' on the right". Kleiner's second on the list was Baruch Marzel, a former member of the outlawed Kach party. Herut failed to gather a seat in these elections due to the Israeli government's two-seat minimum for entering the Knesset (a policy designed to favor the larger and more established political parties). Following the failed campaign, Marzel left Herut to form his own party, the Jewish National Front.
Herut participated in the 2006 elections, again with the letters נץ. This time Kleiner was joined by veteran activists Eli Joseph and Israel Cohen. The main campaign message was - "Compensation for Evacuation of Palestinians". Yana Chudriker, an immigrant from the Ukraine and beauty queen of Israel (1993) was assigned number 4 on the party list. The campaign presented Chudriker wearing a burqa as a warning against the demographic threat of Arabs to Israel and the slogan was "The Demographics Will Poison Us" (in Hebrew the words "poison" (ra'al, רעל) and "burqa" (r'ala, רעלה) sound similar). The campaign drew attention and was labeled as racist, however the party received only 2387 votes. See Herut: The National Movement.
