check out the para in this article below starting Menachem Begin was “both a proud nationalist and an unwavering guardian of liberal principles,” ....
Source: NyTIMES
The Life and Soul of the Party
By SHMUEL ROSNER
JERUSALEM — An entire Israeli political species may soon go extinct, now that Reuven Rivlin, its last senior member, has lost the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Sunday, Netanyahu unceremoniously informed Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset, that he would not back him for another term in the job. This means that Rivlin will not hold any senior position in Netanyahu’s new governing coalition. And it means that Rivlin is less likely to become, as he had hoped, president of Israel when Shimon Peres steps down in a year and a half.
Rivlin’s downfall is more than a personal setback; it marks the final transformation of Likud, Israel’s most powerful party for three decades.
Over the past year, Likud has purged its ranks of what little was left of its aristocracy: its liberal-nationalist wing. Benny Begin, an outgoing minister and the son of Menachem Begin — a former prime minister and Likud’s forefather — and Dan Meridor, another outgoing minister and the son of a longtime confidant of Begin, were dethroned in the last election’s primaries.
Likud is best known as a nationalist right-wing party. But when it was established in 1973, from the merger of Herut, the Liberal Party, the Free Center, the National List and the Labor Movement for Greater Israel, its progressive stances on the rule of law, human rights and the treatment of minorities were an important part of its D.N.A.
Menachem Begin was “both a proud nationalist and an unwavering guardian of liberal principles,” according to the Israel Democracy Institute. In a 1977 letter, Begin expressed his support for appointing an Arab judge to the Israeli Supreme Court. He consistently and demonstrably defended judicial independence and minority rights. “We will not be Rhodesia,” he famously said. And that position, according to Meridor, was “a profound, moral matter.”
Rivlin is of that tradition, too. No doubt he is an ultranationalist: He supports Israeli settlements in the West Bank and opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state there. But he didn’t hesitate to blast a government committee last year for failing to include Arabs among those designated to light a torch during Israel’s Independence Day ceremony. And as speaker of Parliament, he fought against attempts by some of his Likud colleagues to strip the Knesset’s Arab members of their parliamentary immunity.
Likud’s liberals always struggled to live under the same tent as its populists. But for a long time, when the party’s leaders were in charge of selecting candidates for elections, the co-existence seemed mutually beneficial. The populists were expected to secure the votes of the masses, while the liberals gave Likud respectability. But when just before the 2006 elections, a system of primaries was introduced, popularity on the street became all-important. Since then, the liberals have lost ground within the party.
Now Likud no longer cares to listen to them at all. As I once wrote of some party members’ attempts to restrict the Israeli media by amending libel laws, the new Likudniks display “both the eagerness of the newly powerful and the vindictive frustration of the still-marginalized.” Aggressive, tone-deaf and with little patience for tradition, they dismissed Rivlin and Meridor for criticizing a wave of controversial laws. These modern-day Israeli Robespierres have sent the old Likud spirit to the guillotine.
As Dan Margalit argues, by losing Rivlin, Likud is losing “the last prominent representative” of its liberal-nationalist wing. Likud is losing its soul.
