Best withel, toe a
happy, healthy
Weal (Year
Rosh HaShana
HERSHEL & EVELYN MYERS
Bell while& tor a
happy, healthy
()few (Year
ROBERT & PAULA MARQUART
nann 1131\1 i1ltiV7
to- all
oar trim&
and relatiocu•
SAM & MICKIE ORECHKIN
DELRAY BEACH, FL
ESTHER, FRANK, JEREMY & ARIELLE ROSNER
Happy
N ew
'Vacua-
May the covning
Year be filled
with health and
happiness for
all °Lite family
and friends.
ABE & SHERI SLAIM, DANNY,
MELISSA, RENEE & KEVIN
' 5759 Reflect
Did
A 'hum Toward Peace?
DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Jerusalem
ill 5759 be re-
membered as a
year of radical
change in the
course and direction of Israel's
history, or merely as a year when
the government changed hands
after an election and life went on
much as it did before?
The answer, as 5760 begins,
is that the jury is still out. But if
history and Israel's recent elec-
tion are any guide, the radical
change scenario is more likely.
While there have been many
different governments in Israel's
50-year history, only three times
gence of new power blocs. Is-
rael's Sephardi communities, in
particular the large Moroccan
community, were solidly identi-
fied with Likud.
For them, Begin's success
meant they had finally "arrived"
after years of alienation and dis-
crimination. Begin, moreover,
created what was to be a stable
and lasting alliance between his
Likud and the Orthodox par-
ties: the National Religious Par-
ty, Agudat Yisrael and, later, the
Sephardi, and fervently Ortho-
dox, Shas Party. That alliance
was the pivotal axis of Israeli po-
litical life through the late 1970s
and the 1980s.
In foreign affairs, of course,
Begin's advent, far from trigger-
Happy
Ne w
War
May the cowing yecte
be filled with
kectlth and happiness ancl
peospeeity fot4 all OIAN
Fcaletily ancl ntie.ncis
Mcty the covning
year be filled
with health and
happiness foe
all our family
and friends.
LEON & FAY SIEGEL
Happy
N ew
Year.
9/10
MADELON & LOU & MELISSA
SELIGMAN
1999
'44 Detroit Jewish News
May the coming
yea r be filled
with health and
happiness for
all 0141A family
and friends.
THE SHUSTERS - JEFF,
RHONDA, DANNY & AMANDA
Ehud Barak: A sea change for peace or more of the same?
has there been a change in the
party that controls the country.
While this is a regular enough
event in most parliamentary
democracies, in Israel's case each
of these changes ushered in a
veritable cataclysm in the do-
mestic and diplomatic directions
in which the country was head-
ed.
In 1977, after nearly three
decades of uninterrupted rule by
the Labor Party or its predeces-
sors, Menachem Begin won an
election, at last, as the head of
the Likud bloc.
Begin's victory signaled not
only a sharp turn to the ideolog-
ical right, but also the emer-
ing tension and war as the left
had feared, brought about the
first breakthrough to peace: the
Camp David conference and
the peace treaty with Egypt.
But the Likud and its allies,
determined to perpetuate Israel's
rule over the West Bank, held
on tenaciously to the Greater
Land of Israel.
It took the return to power of
the Labor Party under Yitzhak
Rabin in 1992 for the second
great cataclysm in Israel's diplo-
matic saga: the Oslo accords
with the Palestinians.
On the domestic front, Ra-
bin's victory seemed to signal the
beginning of a turnabout in the