Friday, 23 January 2009Bethlehem - Israel's right-wing Likud party is holding its lead in the polls as a 10 February parliamentary election approaches.
A Maariv/Teleseker poll released on Friday shows Likud winning 28 seats in the Knesset, beating the center-right Kadima party's 24. Labor received 16 and the religious Shas faction nine.
Labor's Ehud Barak, the defense minister, and Kadima's Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister appeared to receive an electoral boost in the polls during the three-week war on the Gaza Strip that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians. However, Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu, who pressed for a large-scale invasion of Gaza early on, seems to have bounced back.
The Likud party's platform flatly rejects the creation of any Palestinian state. It also says that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, illegal under international law, are "the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel."
In Likud's primary elections in December, an extreme-right faction within the party, mainy drawn from the settler movement, won key positions on the party's list. |
Friday, 23 January 2009
Ma'an News
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