Meimad
Meimad
Founded in 1988
Meimad was a moderate religious movement established in 1988 toward the elections for the 12th Knesset. The movement emerged against the background of growing dissatisfaction among moderate religious Zionists with the growing political extremism of the National Religious Party. On the one hand, Meimad declared its loyalty to the Land of Israel. But, on the other hand, it declared its opposition to positing the land as a supreme value. It viewed the aspiration for peace a fundamental Jewish value that justifies painful decisions, such as withdrawal from territories that are part of the Land of the Patriarchs. Meimad did not pass the electoral threshold and did not run in the next elections in 1992.
In early 1993, Meimad was re-established as a nonpartisan ideological movement. In early 1999, prior to the elections for the 15th Knesset, Meimad reverted to being a political party and joined the Labor Party and Gesher in forming the One Israel (Yisrael Ahat) list. Meimad continued to run on Labor Party lists in the next two elections, in 2003 and 2006, in each of which Michael Melchior represented the party in the Knesset.
Having ended its collaboration with Labor during the 17th Knesset, Meimad ran in the 2009 elections for the 18th Knesset on a joint list with the Green Party, but the list did not pass the electoral threshold.
| Election Year | Votes Count | Number Of Seats | Share Of Votes | List Of Candidates | Platform |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1988 | 15,783 | - | 0.7 |
Candidates
|
Note that the candidates in this table are in Hebrew
Yehuda Amital, Michael Melchior
Yehuda Amital served as a Minister without Portfolio in the government headed by Shimon Peres, which arose after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Meimad had no representation in the Knesset at the time, and Peres appointed Amital in order to ease the tension between religious and secular Israelis following the assassination. In 1999, Michael Melchior was appointed Minister of Social and Diaspora Affairs in the government of Ehud Barak.