Legislative elections were held in Israel on 28 January 2003. The result was a resounding victory for Ariel Sharon's Likud.
The previous separate election for Prime Minister was scrapped, and the post was returned to the leader of the party successfully forming the working coalition government.
Background
Second Intifada
Similarly to the 2001 elections for the position of prime minister, these elections were also affected by the Second Intifada, which was a period of intense fighting and Palestinian militancy campaigns. Despite the fact that since the last elections there was a significant deterioration in the security situation in Israel, after Operation Defensive Shield in May 2002 and Operation Determined Path in June 2002, there was an improvement in the security situation.
The fact that Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was the defense minister in most of this period (until the unity government was dismantled) did not allow the Labor party to establish an alternative to government policies, mainly because it was difficult to present a position contrary to that which was supported by the party up until then. Contributing this was the militaristic tendency of large sections from the Israeli public that supported more severe measures than those which were actually implemented against the Palestinians for militant and terrorist attacks against Israelis. This tendency led to a situation in which the significant differences regarding the way Israel should react to the Intifada were not split between the Labor party and the Likud party, but rather between the dovish faction in the Labor party (which supported the positions of the left-wing Meretz party) and the hawkish faction in the Labor party (whose position was very close to that of the Likud party).
Although Prime Minister Ehud Barak did not run in these elections (and in practice was almost two years out of the political system), at the time Ehud Barak and the Labor Party were widely considered by many in the Israeli public as those directly responsible for the outbreak of the second intifada.
In general, similar to previous elections, the Intifada created a significant gap in the public opinions, as the public which once identified itself as "moderate left" drifted significantly away from the left, leaving a vacuum between it and the far left group. This situation significantly affected the potential voters of the Labor Party, which since 1977 relied primarily on the moderate left.
In addition, the situation in which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that early elections would be held, just several days after the Labor party left the unity government, caught the Labor party in a situation in which it did not yet receive a chance to elect the head of the party. When it eventually elected Amram Mitzna, he had little more than one month to gather the attention of the Israeli public and convince the Israeli public of his positions—the most prominent among them being his claim that Israel had no interest in continuing to have control in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank.
Labor party leadership struggle
After Barak took a break from politics in late February 2001, the Labor party established a unity government with the Likud party, in which Shimon Peres represented the Labor party as the most senior figure of its ministers. At the same time, Benyamin Ben-Eliezer competed against Matan Vilnai for the position of defense minister in the unity government (Shimon Peres was appointed to the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs). The Labor party primaries were set for September 4, 2001. These primaries were supposedly won by Avraham Burg (who was the Speaker of the Knesset at the time), although in practice there was a very small number of votes (only 1,000 votes in favor of Burg), which led to many claims of fraud, especially of fraud within ballots of the Israeli Druze community. After a long series of discussions and accusations regarding ethnic discrimination of the Druze public, it was decided that the primaries would be held again in 51 polling stations (mostly within the Druze community) on 26 December. Those elections had a relatively low voter turnout and at the end of those elections, Ben-Eliezer won with a small gap of just 1,900 votes.