For twenty-nine years, Mapai and its Labor Party successors had governed Israel. It was the party of the founding generation, of Ben-Gurion and Meir, of secular socialism and the kibbutz. The election of May 17, 1977, counted through the night into the 18th, broke that monopoly.
The numbers were precise and devastating. Likud, under Menachem Begin, secured 43 seats in the Knesset. The Alignment, led by Shimon Peres, won only 32. A new party, Dash, captured 15. The arithmetic was clear. A coalition was possible without Labor. Begin, the former Irgun commander, the fiery orator long cast as an oppositional figurehead, was now the prime minister-designate.
The shift was not merely partisan. It was demographic, cultural, and ideological. Labor’s old guard had lost touch with a growing population of Mizrahi Jews, who felt marginalized and found a voice in Begin’s populism. It was a rejection of the socialist-oriented establishment after the trauma of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The victory signaled a turn toward nationalist and free-market policies, and a harder line on territorial compromise. The word used was *mahapakh*—an upheaval. The political map, once considered immutable, was redrawn in a single night. The following day, the machinery of state began the quiet, procedural transfer of power to a man and a movement it had spent decades sidelining.