ABSTRACT
The victory of Menahem Begin’s Likud block in Israel’s tenth Knesset elections during 1981 confirmed that the landslide in the ninth elections of 1977 was no accident. Party profiles drawn by Israeli pollsters showed Labor’s supporters in the last two elections as mainly Ashkenazi, middle-aged or older, better-educated, white-collar workers of middle and upper income. In Israel’s early days when the population increased by scores of thousands a year, the cost of immigration was also a major stimulant to inflation, but immigration has declined so that it no longer drains the economy. The year after Israel’s highest inflation, a poll testing the sense of economic well-being showed that the overwhelming majority of citizens did not consider themselves to be bad off, although the number who thought themselves well-to-do had declined. A dilemma of little concern to the Begin government was the situation of Israel’s Arab minority, constituting some 16 percent of the population by the 1980s.
