Cherut
Cherut ( English Herut , Hebrew חרות 'Freedom', actually תנועת החרות- Tnu'at haCherut = freedom movement ) was the party organization of revisionist Zionism in Israel. This conservative - nationalist movement was the strongest opposition party to the ruling Israeli Labor Party . In 1988 the Cherut merged with the Liberal Party and other parties in the Likud .
history
Cherut was founded in 1948 by Menachem Begin as the political successor to the underground organization Irgun , which was responsible, among other things, for the attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. The founding of the party posed a challenge to the haTzohar party , which was established by Begin's predecessor Ze'ev Jabotinsky .
On the occasion of Begin's visit to New York City , in a letter to the editor published in the New York Times on December 4, 1948 , over 20 Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt , compared revisionist Zionism with " Nazi and Fascist parties."
In the first Knesset , the Cherut was only one of the medium-sized parties with 14 seats . The party had a reputation for being outside the moderate Israeli mainstream , and David Ben-Gurion said in a well-known quote that he would form a coalition with every party except the Cherut and the communist Maki . Ben Gurion also avoided calling Begin by his name, instead referring to “the (Knesset) member who, alongside Dr. Bader is sitting ".
As a result, the party grew slightly, primarily because the Sephardic Israelis were hostile to the Labor Party. In 1951 and 1952, the Cherut took a negative attitude towards the Luxembourg Agreement with Germany and was able to gain popularity due to the widespread rejection of this reparation agreement . In 1965 the party was merged with the Liberal Party of Israel to form the Gahal bloc, but even then it retained its own structures and dominated the new alliance. In the course of the Six Day War and the growth of nationalist tendencies in 1967, the Gahal bloc (and with it the Cherut) already brought 22 seats into a grand coalition , Begin and Josef Sapir of the Liberals became ministers without portfolio .
Even after the new elections in 1969, the Cherut remained in government for another term, but resigned from the government in 1970 because of the Rogers Plan . In 1973 there was another union, and Gahal formed the Likud with other conservative parties , but this time too the Cherut remained the determining force. In 1977 she was able to win the election as part of the Likud alliance and thus stepped out of the role of the opposition party. Begin and his successors in the office of leader of the Likud party, such as Yitzchak Shamir , came from the Cherut. In 1988, the Likud Alliance parties also formally united and the Cherut ceased to exist independently. After the party lost its independence, it was re-established in 1998 by nationalist Likud dissenters. The new Cherut ( Cherut haChadasch ) (see Cherut, the national movement ) was led by Benny Begin and later by Michael Kleiner . After two unsuccessful Knesset elections in 2003 and 2006, however, the two went back to Likud before the 2009 Knesset election, and Cherut did not run again.
The number of seats in the Knesset :
| Cherut | Gahal | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st Knesset | 2nd Knesset | 3rd Knesset | 4th Knesset | 5th Knesset | 5th Knesset | 6th Knesset | 7th Knesset |
| 14th | 10 | 15th | 18th | 18th | 22nd | 27 | 29 |
literature
- Yechiam Weitz: From Underground to Political Party: The Foundation of the Herut Movement . Haifa 2003
Individual evidence
- ^ Michael Wolffsohn , Douglas Bokovoy: Israel: History, Politics, Society, Economy (1882-2001); Springer-Verlag 2013, p. 165
- ^ New Palestine Party. Visit of Menachen Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed. A letter to The New York Times. Saturday December 4, 1948 by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, et al.
- ↑ Only data before the founding of the Likud are included - figures from the Gahal movement include those from the Liberal Party