Herut: The National Movement
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Herut (חרות "Freedom") or Herut: The National Movement is a right wing Israeli political party. It sees itself as the ideological successor to the historical Herut party and Zeev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionist movement.
In 1998, after Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ceded territory to the Palestinians in the Wye accords, three Likud Knesset members split off from the Likud in an act of protest. Led by Ze'ev Benyamin Begin, Michael Kleiner and David Re'em. It was also backed by former Herut leader and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Herut participated in the elections of 1999 joining forces with Moledet and Tkuma to form the National Union list, with Begin as the list's candidate for the post of Prime Minister (the 1999 elections in Israel supported a dual vote - one for a party and one for the prime minister). Begin withdrew his candidacy for Prime Ministership three days before the election to help Netanyahu in the competition against Labor candidate Ehud Barak, but it didn't help and the Israeli right wing suffered one of its worst fiascos. National Union received four seats in the Knesset and facing lack of popular support for Herut, Begin resigned from political life shortly after the election. He was quoted as saying that he had become a "crowd leader with no crowds". Michael Kleiner replaced Begin as chairman of Herut and after several months, left the National Union and began reestablishing Herut as an independent party.
In 2003, Herut made the first attempt to run for the Knesset on its own since the early 1960s. For its ballot it chose the Hebrew letters נץ, meaning "hawk", and the slogan "the 'hawkiest' on the right". Kleiner's second on the list was Baruch Marzel, a former member of the outlawed Kach party. Herut failed to gather a seat in these elections due to the Israeli government's two-seat minimum for entering the Knesset (a policy designed to favor the larger and more established political parties). Following the failed campaign, Marzel left Herut to form his own party, the Jewish National Front.
Kleiner participated in the 2006 elections, again with the letters נץ. The main campaign message was - "Compensation for Evacuation of Palestinians". Yana Chudriker, an immigrant from the Ukraine and beauty queen of Israel (1993) was assigned as number 4 on the party list. The campaign presented Chudriker wearing a burqa as a warning against the demographic threat of Arabs to Israel and the slogan was "The Demographics Will Poison Us" (in Hebrew the words "poison" (ra'al, רעל) and "burqa" (r'ala, רעלה) sound similar). The campaign drew attention and was labeled as racist, however the party received only 2387 votes.
