The claim that only a big government can make big decisions crashes repeatedly on the rocks of Israel’s reality. Narrowly based governments (with at least a 61-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset) and even minority governments (governments with 60 seats or less) were the ones that made Israel’s truly major moves over the years, whereas broad-based governments blocked important measures when each one of the two leading parties vied for prestige.
I am convinced that had the 1987 London Agreement between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Jordan’s King Hussein been proposed to a narrowly based government — led by either the left or the right — it would not have rushed to ditch an option to examine whether agreement was possible on Israel’s eastern border with a responsible Palestinian-Jordanian entity. The fact that Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir was prime minister and Peres was foreign minister under a power-sharing unity government led the Likud members of the security cabinet to vote against the agreement. One of them confirmed to Al-Monitor that the Likud would not have conceived of joining a Peres-led peace initiative.
