The attacks, the operations and the scandalous speech: the events that changed the election results in the 90th minute

From the Palestinian response to the assassination of "The Engineer", through the bombing of the reactor in Iraq to the roars following the "Speech of the Chachachaim".

History shows that even when victory in the elections seems guaranteed - one event can change the whole picture.

Ask Shamir, Peres, Begin, Rabin, Sharon and Netanyahu

Eli Ashkenazi

10/31/2022

Monday, October 31, 2022, 02:59 Updated: 22:38

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On video: the funeral of Ronan Hanania, who was murdered in the attack in Kiryat Arba (Photo: Roni Kanfo)

The serious attack that took place on Saturday in Hebron, in which Ronan Hanania was murdered in front of his son and three others were injured, is reminiscent of severe terrorist incidents from the past that occurred just days before Knesset elections.

Like this week, even in the previous times the election campaigns were stormy and tight and some have attributed to the attacks an influence on the election results.

The attack on line 961

Such an event occurred on October 30, 1988, less than 48 hours before the election day for the 12th Knesset.

On that day, Sunday early evening, a bus on Egged's route 961 traveled from Tiberias to Jerusalem.

When he reached the outskirts of Jericho, three terrorists emerged and threw Molotov cocktails at him.

The bus soon caught fire.

Rachel Weiss, 26 years old, who tried to rescue her three young children, Ephraim, Nathaniel and Raphael, was burned to death with them.

David Delrosa, a 19-year-old Nahal soldier from Jerusalem, was one of the passengers on the bus. That day he made his way to Jerusalem, to perform a minor operation, to raise his medical profile and participate in the parachute jump. When he tried to save the mother and her children, he was badly burned on his hands and face. His lungs and heart were badly damaged. A few weeks later he died of his wounds, in a London hospital, where he was supposed to undergo organ transplant surgery.

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To the full article

The Chachachaim's speech caused an uproar.

Dodo Topaz (photo: screenshot, Keshet 12)

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The severe attack, during the first intifada, shocked Israel.

A day and a half later, on November 1, voters went to the polling stations to vote for the 12th Knesset.

The elections came at the end of four years of a unity government.

Shimon Peres, who began his term as prime minister, was replaced after two years by Yitzhak Shamir.

Yitzhak Rabin served as Minister of Defense.

A day after the attack, the terrorists were arrested and Rabin called on the military prosecutor's office to consider seeking the death penalty for the terrorists.

However, it seems that it no longer helped Rabin and Peres.

The Likud election campaign attributed to a defeatist policy and warned against concessions and an increase in attacks.

"If God forbid Peres is in power, they will celebrate in the territories," said the Likud broadcasts that of course preceded the attack.

The elections were close and in the end the Likud led by Shamir defeated the formation led by Peres, on the edge of a mandate: 39-40.

The alignment decreased by five mandates from the 1984 elections, and the Likud lost only one mandate.

The right-wing parties - Crossroads of Raful, birthplace of Rehabam Zeevi and the Revival led by Yuval Na'am, won seven mandates.

Many attributed the loss of the formation to the severe attack.

The attack in Jericho is considered the most significant event that caused voter movement on polling day, also due to its context - an election campaign that focused on the intifada and its consequences, both due to the severe tragedy and due to the close proximity to election day.

As mentioned, in the history of the elections in Israel there were attacks and other security incidents that, in hindsight, were attributed to having an influence on the election results.

Three and a half years after the disaster in Jericho, on May 24, 1992, about a month before the elections to the 13th Knesset, Helena Rapp, a 15-year-old girl, was stabbed to death in Bat Yam. The killer was a Palestinian from Gaza.

The girl's murder came after a series of stabbing attacks that increased the feeling of insecurity among the residents of Israel.

Following the attack, stormy demonstrations broke out in Bat Yam and it became an event that recurred during the elections, at the end of which the Labor Party led by Yitzhak Rabin won 44 mandates.

Likud with Shamir fell to 32 seats.

Dropped in 1992 to 32 mandates.

Yitzhak Shamir (Photo: Government Press Office)

The elections to the 14th Knesset, in 1996, were also held in the shadow of difficult security events.

Shimon Peres entered the election system as the candidate of the Labor Party, leading by a significant margin over Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud candidate.

Peres was prime minister at the time, having been appointed to the position after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on 4/11/1995.

Three months later, in February, he decided to go to the elections in May 1996, half a year ahead of schedule.

In January, Israel killed the main terrorist - the "engineer" Yahya Aish.

As a result, a severe wave of terrorist attacks began in Israel.

Dozens of Israeli citizens were murdered in attacks in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ashkelon;

The polls began to indicate a strong drift to the right.

A summit was held in Sharm el-Sheikh, where all the top world leaders came to show support for the fight against terrorism: Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, Helmut Kohl, John Major, King Hassan, King Hussein and Yasser Arafat.

They were supposed to boost Peres' campaign, but to no avail.

A month later, Israel launched the "Grapes of Wrath" operation against the terrorist organizations in southern Lebanon.

Shells fired by the IDF accidentally hit a building where Lebanese citizens were sheltering. 102 people were killed. The serious incident caused many of the Arab voters to withdraw their support from Persia.

A serious security incident also occurred on the eve of the 1977 revolution; today everyone knows the helicopter disaster in the skies of the Upper Galilee in 1997 , but really not far from the terrible attack in which Rachel Weiss, her children and David Delrosa were murdered, a similar and large-scale disaster had occurred 20 years earlier. On the night of May 10, 1977, the paratrooper brigade conducted an exercise in the Jordan Valley. 44 fighters of the May Company of the 890th Battalion and ten air crew members took off Three minutes after takeoff, the helicopter crashed into a hill, north of Jericho, near Kibbutz Yatav.

The helicopter crashed and caught fire.

All the warriors on it perished.

The disaster, which was later called the disaster of the 9th Knesset, happened a week before the elections to the 9th Knesset, which were held on May 17. The State of Israel was shocked. The televised confrontation between Prime Minister Shimon Peres and the head of Likud, Menachem Begin, was postponed for two days. In these elections, the revolution took place The political. The ruling party for 29 years was defeated and the Likud came to power.

The defeat of the alignment was so great that it is difficult to attribute the cause of Begin's victory to the heavy disaster. His party garnered 43 seats, the alignment lost 19 seats in the Knesset and was left with 32 seats, and God bless you, the rising power of those elections, became the third largest party with 15 seats.

Soldiers in Operation Grapes of Wrath 1996 (Photo: AP)

And not only in the Knesset elections: the attacks that rocked the Likud

Serious security incidents also occurred twice during elections for the Likud movement: on November 28, 2002, the day of the primaries in which Sharon faced Netanyahu, a shooting attack occurred at the Likud branch in Beit Shan.

Six people were killed and 60 were injured.

In the morning of that day there was an attack on a hotel in Kenya in which three Israeli citizens were killed and 10 were injured.

After the attack on Beit Shan, Sharon held a press conference and called on Likud members to "go out and vote."

In these elections he defeated Netanyahu.

On May 2, 2004, Tali Hatuel and her four daughters - Hila, Hadar, Roni and Marev - were murdered in an attack in the Kissuf area.

On the same day, Likud officials held a vote in a referendum on the disengagement plan led by the party's leader, Eric Sharon.

At the end of that day, Likud members decided, by a majority of 60%, to reject Sharon's plan.

Hair-raising promotions - precisely before the elections

But security incidents were not only imposed on the ruling parties, some also initiated them.

On June 7, 1981, the Air Force planes left on their way to one of the heroic operations carried out by the Air Force.

8 F-16 pilots managed to destroy the atomic reactor that Saddam Hussein built in Iraq, 1,100 kilometers away from Israel.

Menachem Begin entered the election system in a very difficult situation and his party lagged in the polls after Shimon Peres' formation.

The results of that operation must have helped him to improve the Likud's situation, which won on the edge of Mandate, 47-48, in the array there were those who criticized the timing of the bombing, but of course it did not help them.

20 years earlier, in 1961, there was a prize on the other side.

So as a young Deputy Minister of Defense, Peres stood smiling next to the Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, when Israel first launched a rocket into space.

The launch of "Shavit 2", a rocket for meteorological research, caused great excitement in Israel and raised the morale of the people.

But the timing of the launch, a month before the elections to the 5th Knesset, provoked quite a bit of criticism.

In the end, it is not clear how the publication helped Ben-Gurion.

His party, Mapai, lost 5 mandates from its strength and dropped from 47 mandates to 42.

The oil was poured into the fire.

Menachem Begin (Photo: AP)

Not just terrorist attacks: the speech that kept Begin in power

And not only security incidents left their mark on election campaigns.

There is also that a publicized event, or a last-minute election exercise, created significant weight and influenced many voters.

In the 1996 elections, despite the wave of attacks and the Kfar Kana incident in the "Grapes of Wrath" operation, the incumbent Prime Minister, Peres, still managed to maintain a small gap with Netanyahu.

Two days before the elections, the Chabad movement launched a campaign unprecedented in its scope; in one night, the country was covered with "Only Netanyahu" signs.

It's good for the Jews." The campaign, financed by the Australian billionaire, Chabad follower, Yosef Gutnik, is attributed to another drift of the last few days that tipped the balance of the closest elections ever held in Israel.

In the television samples of the election night, Peres was still leading, but Israel woke up with a new prime minister: Netanyahu beat Peres by a margin of only 29,457 votes.

Another famous event that took place very close to the 1981 elections was the "Speech of the Chachachaim" delivered by Dodo Topaz and the brilliant use Menachem Begin made of it.

As in many election campaigns, that year too, Rabin Square, then still the Kings of Israel Square, was used as a site where the two major parties, the Likud and the Alignment, demonstrated their strength.

Three days before the elections, the "alignment" held a large election rally.

These were the most violent elections held in Israel.

The sectarian divide was one of the topics that came up again and again in the campaign.

Peres suffered tomato volleys at election rallies and into this cauldron entered the entertainer Dodo Topaz who moderated the formation rally.

"It's a pleasure to see this crowd, and it's a pleasure to see that there are no chachachams here," he called out to a crowd that applauded him.

"... the Chachachs are in Ze'ev Citadel. They hardly have any gimmicks, if they go to the army at all. Here are the soldiers and the commanders of the combat units," Topaz exclaimed and smiled.

The speech was like oil poured into the fire.

A day later, in the same place, the Likud held its concluding rally, two days before the elections.

Begin once again impressed with his unique rhetorical ability.

First, he called the red flags that were waved at the leftist rally "the flags of Communism" that were waved by "those who were brought here in the trucks of the kibbutzim".

Then he turned to Topaz;

"Last night in this square stood a young actor, what's his name? Uncle? Uncle, Tu-Paz, Uncle Topaz, here he said... in the ears of a hundred thousand people in the formation: 'The Chechchas, they are in the Wolf Fortress, they can barely see camels. .. here... are the soldiers and the commanders of the combat units'..., " roared Begin and was answered with tremendous contempt aimed at the formation.

"Until this morning I didn't hear the word Chachachim and I didn't know its meaning. But when he, what's his name, Do-Do-To-Paz, said the foolishness... the whole audience that was standing here last night, cheered...", brought up Begin raised his voice and tens of thousands booed.

"He tells his uncle Topaz who he meant. The members of our Mizrah tribe were heroic fighters in the underground as well... Moshe Barzani was a Sephardi from Iraq. Ashkenazi, Iraqi, Jews, fighters, brothers," he shouted.

Two days later the elections were held.

Begin managed to keep the government on the edge of half a percent of the votes.

Peres lost for the second time, but not the last.

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