Of the 18 elections held in Israel over the past 50 years, only five led to the rise of a prime minister from outside the right-wing Likud – and never for a full term. For nearly three decades after the state’s founding, Israel was governed by the Labor movement – which later ran as the Alignment, a bloc of Labor and the left-wing Mapam. That dominance ended with the upheaval of 1977, when Menachem Begin’s Likud defeated the Alignment, then led by Shimon Peres.
