Herut – The National Movement
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Herut – The National Movement (Hebrew: חרות – התנועה הלאומית, Herut – HaTenoa'a HaLeumit), commonly known as just Herut, is a minor right-wing political party in Israel. Though it sees itself as the ideological successor to the historical Herut party (which merged into Likud) it is in reality a new and separate party.
[edit] Background
The party was formed in 1998 when Ze'ev Benyamin Begin, Michael Kleiner and David Re'em broke away from Likud during the fourteenth Knesset. The breakaway was the result of disagreements with Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu over the Wye River Memorandum and the Hebron Agreement, which had ceded land to the Palestinians. Though not an MK at the time, the new party was also backed by former Herut leader and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Herut participated in the 1999 elections as part of the National Union, a right-wing alliance of itself, Moledet and Tkuma with Begin at its head. In the simultaneous election for Prime Minister, Begin had originally planned to stand, but dropped out three days before the election to avoid splitting the right-wing vote between himself and Netanyahu (though it didn't help, as Netanyahu lost to Ehud Barak by more than 12%). In the Knesset election, the National Union won only 3% of the vote and four seats. The party's poor performance led to Begin resigning as head of the party and retiring from politics before the Knesset term began, and Herut's one allocated seat was taken by Kleiner.
During the Knesset session, Kleiner pulled out of the National Union, establishing Herut as an independent party in the Knesset. In the 2003 elections the party ran alone. It chose the ballot letters נץ, meaning "hawk", and used the slogan "the 'hawkiest' on the right". Kleiner led the list, with Baruch Marzel, a former member of the outlawed Kach party taking second place. The party won 36,202 votes, though it was only 1.1% of the total, and not enough to pass the 1.5% electoral threshold. Soon after Marzel left to found his own party, the Jewish National Front.
The party ran alone again for the 2006 election with Kleiner at its head and Yana Chudriker, a former beauty queen in fourth spot. Chudriker featured in a poster campaign with her wearing a burqa as a warning against the perceived demographic threat posed by Israeli Arabs, using the slogan was "The Demographics Will Poison Us" (a pun, as in Hebrew the words "poison" (ra'al, רעל) and "burqa" (ra'ala, רעלה) sound similar). The campaign drew attention and was labelled as Negative. In the election itself, the party won just 2,387 votes - 0.07%, well below the new threshold of 2%.
