ABSTRACT
The establishment of independent "Russian" Jewish community politics in Israel in the mid-1990s, including the political movements that were established by the former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrants, may be seen as one of the most important elements of the social and political legacy of the Rabin era. The 1990s as well as the beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed the formation, within the Israeli political spectrum, of new Russian-speaking groups, which are now in the process of developing their status vis-a-vis the traditional Israeli political establishment. The model of political behavior of the FSU immigrants in Israel stabilized in the second half of the 1990s, and since then the community has been almost equally split between the mainstream and the Russian immigrant parties. At the end of 2004 and in 2005, several other groups and politicians demonstrated their ambitions to inherit the electoral legacy of Yisrael B’aliya.
