The claim that only a big government can make big decisions crashes repeatedly on the rocks of Israel’s reality. Narrowly based governments (with at least a 61-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset) and even minority governments (governments with 60 seats or less) were the ones that made Israel’s truly major moves over the years, whereas broad-based governments blocked important measures when each one of the two leading parties vied for prestige.

I am convinced that had the 1987 London Agreement between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Jordan’s King Hussein been proposed to a narrowly based government — led by either the left or the right — it would not have rushed to ditch an option to examine whether agreement was possible on Israel’s eastern border with a responsible Palestinian-Jordanian entity. The fact that Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir was prime minister and Peres was foreign minister under a power-sharing unity government led the Likud members of the security cabinet to vote against the agreement. One of them confirmed to Al-Monitor that the Likud would not have conceived of joining a Peres-led peace initiative.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that a national unity government led by Shamir would have agreed to take part in the 1991 Madrid peace conference. Presumably, the Labor ministers would have backed the move, the Likud ministers would have objected and Israel would have rejected the invitation to the international event. The very fact that Shamir headed a narrow right-wing government meant that he did not have broad backing for rejecting Israeli participation in an international gathering with which he was so unhappy.

A narrow government led by Menachem Begin signed Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt (1979), Yitzhak Rabin’s narrow government led the Oslo process with the Palestinians (1993) and the peace treaty with Jordan a year later, and the narrow government of Ehud Barak pulled Israeli troops out of Lebanon (2000) after 18 years.