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that he and others were convinced Bibi couldn’t win. A couple of weeks later,
Yitzhik Mordechai seemed on the verge of becoming the latest of Bibi’s ministers
to resign. He was openly flirting with the idea of joining a new centrist party that
had been formed by Likud’s Dan Meridor. Bibi struck back with a mixture of
subtlety and venom. He fired Mordechai, accusing him of being driven by personal
ambition. Then he offered the Defense Minister’s job to Misha Arens.

Yitzhik did join the Center Party, as did Amnon Lipkin, who had ended his
term as chief-of-staff and, with initial opinion poll numbers suggesting he’d do
well, even briefly entered the race for Prime Minister. Now, he endorsed Yitzhik
Mordechai instead: a man not only with strong military credentials, but of Sephardi
background and religiously observant, and a proven politician and cabinet minister.
It was clear that he would be going after many of the same votes I needed to win.

That situation wasn’t ideal, to put it mildly. But all I could do at this stage was
to put our own campaign house in order. I hoped that if we ran the campaign I
expected, there wouldn’t be a run-off.

* * *

At the start of April, the final list of candidates was set. There were five. In
addition to Bibi, Yitzhik and me, Benny Begin had decided to run on the right.
Also in the contest was Knesset member Azmi Beshara, the first Israeli Arab
citizen to seek national office.

When we chose “One Israel” as the name of our campaign alliance, it was not
meant just as a catchy phrase. Though now a half-century old, the country had
rarely seemed so diverse, and in many ways divided. It was not just the old fault
line between Labor and Revisionist Zionism that defined our politics, or even the
Ashkenazi-Sephardi gulf that had predominated since the late 1970s. There were
new, younger, more assertive, more right-wing and more pro-settlement voices
among the Orthodox. There was the contrast between the overwhelmingly secular,
politically and socially liberal, and culturally Western Tel Aviv, with its lively
cafés and restaurants, and the constellation of wealthy suburbs to the north; and
smaller Israeli towns and cities in the interior, Jerusalem as well, not to mention

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