In the runup to the vote, Sharon ordered the military closure of the occupied territories, deploying 30,000 police and soldiers. Israeli forces killed 12 Palestinians in Gaza City in fighting on January 26.

In the days after the voting, Tel Aviv reinforced the offensive as Israeli forces blocked major roads, destroyed markets and machine shops, and closed Palestinian television stations.

Likud’s 38 seats--less than one-third of the 120-member Knesset, or parliament--was nearly double its previous holding. Under new leader Amram Mitzna the Labour Party captured 19 seats, its lowest share in the half-century existence of the colonial-settler state. The Labour leader had advocated a combination of harsh military measures against Palestinians and negotiations with their leaders.

Mitzna refused Sharon’s immediate offer of a share in a new coalition government.

The Shinui party, a secular opponent of the ultra-orthodox parties that had joined the previous government, more than doubled its tally, ending up with 15 seats. Party leader Yosef Lapid pitched his appeal to Jews from Western Europe as distinct from those from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Russia. He welded his call for a "secular unity government" to an appeal to "westernism," saying that "if we let the east European ghetto and the north African ghetto take over, we will...be lost within a terrible Levantine dunghill."

The coalition government of Likud-Labour and smaller parties broke apart last October when the then-Labour leader and defense minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, refused to endorse a budget by Sharon that included substantial cuts in pensions and benefits for university students and single-parent families--a growing proportion of the population. Ben-Eliezer proposed a series of alternative spending cuts aimed at the subsidies provided to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

The average life span of an Israeli government in the past decade has been less than two years, although the official electoral term is four years.

The Palestinian resistance and the economic crisis were both weighty factors in the breakup of Sharon’s previous government and still confront the one he is now forming.

Israeli unemployment stands at 10.5 percent, a figure that has steadily risen for more than four years. The government projects the number to reach 12 percent by the end of the year. The gross domestic product declined by 1 percent in 2002, the second year of decline in a row--a first for Israel--and a similar performance is forecast for 2003.

Likud’s campaign platform included the promise to obtain a $4 billion grant and $10 billion in loan guarantees from the United States to keep the economy afloat.  
 
Israeli assaults, Palestinian resistance
In the period leading up to the election, Israeli tanks, troops, and helicopters struck deeper into Gaza City than at any time in the past two years of fighting, the New York Times reported January 26.

The Israeli assault on the city of 300,000 met with fierce resistance. Defenders fired antitank missiles and rifles at Israeli forces. The heaviest fighting occurred in the central market.

Two days before the elections the Israeli rulers halted all Palestinian travel between Palestinian cities and across the boundaries of the West Bank and Gaza. In Gaza City Israeli soldiers dynamited more than a dozen metal shops, destroying some 100 metalworking lathes, claiming that they were used to produce rockets and mortar bombs. Israeli forces killed at least a dozen Palestinians in the raid.

In the West Bank city of Jenin, Palestinian fighters went into action in response to an assault by 20 Israeli tanks and jeeps in one neighborhood on January 27, witnesses told the Associated Press. In the exchange Israeli troops killed Rashad Arabi, a member of a militia associated with Yasir Arafat’s Fatah movement. Another Palestinian was shot as he approached Arabi’s body. The army called it a "routine operation."

Israel’s January 30 raids on the West Bank cities of Hebron and Tulkarm included a search for "incitement material" at television stations, according to the army. Soldiers confiscated videotapes, audiotapes, and literature that Israeli officials labeled as "terrorist." Ahmad Taradeh, a 20-year-old Hebron University student, said the army assault on the occupied territories was "the real result of the election." Among the Palestinian people, he said, "resistance will increase."

Israeli human rights group B’tselem announced in early January that the government is holding more than 1,000 Palestinians in "indefinite detention," without charges or trial, the most since the period prior to the 1993 Oslo Accords. The police routinely renew the six-month detention orders, and the Israeli Supreme Court has rejected most petitions to release prisoners.

The majority are held in southern Israel’s Negev Desert at the Ketziot tent camp. Notorious for its overcrowded tents, extreme heat in summer, and freezing cold in winter, the prison closed in 1996 but was reopened last April.  
 
U.S. troops stationed in Israel
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has stationed 600 troops in Israel in preparation for the assault on Iraq. The soldiers will help set up the Patriot missile systems supplied to the settler state as a shield against Iraqi Scud missiles.

The missiles have been supplied as Washington repeats its Gulf War demand that the Israeli air force stay out of the coming war. Israeli officials delivered a thumbs-down verdict on the missile batteries supplied a decade ago. The new Patriots have undergone further development, and are supplemented by the Israeli-developed Arrow missile.  
 
 
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