Israeli. Levy refused to accept Netanyahu as the new Likud chairman. The result was the establishment of Gesher ("Bridge"), Levy's own political party. Levy believed he could draw a mass defection from the Likud of parliament members, and such a disaster would lead senior party members in the Central Committee into a panic that would topple Benjamin Netanyahu. What instead occurred was that only David Magen, a Moroccan politician and former mayor of Kiryat Gat who served as Minister of Economics and Planning in the last Shamir government, broke with the Likud. Though many of Gesher's members were derided by the press as lackeys of Levy, Magen later broke with Levy to join the Center Party in 1998 (then known as "Israel in the Center"). By Winter 1996, Levy was beginning to break under the stress of his first election campaign outside of the Likud. Since the 4 November 1995 murder of Rabin, Netanyahu was frantically trying to moderate his image from a hard-line demagogue into a skeptic who wanted to slow the pace of concessions to PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Levy's inclusion would somewhat bring him closer to that goal without forcing him to take a clear stand in favour of the Oslo Accords. The opposition leader was trying to bridge the gap by recruiting the hard-line Tzomet ("Junction") party of Gen. Rafael Eitan on the right, as well as the moderate right-wing Gen. Yitzhak Mordechai in the center. Throughout the spring, Netanyahu and Levy held negotiations, and in the end Levy agreed to establish Likud–Gesher–Tzomet, a joint three-party list for the May 1996 elections. Though the broad-based coalition at the end of the outgoing Knesset included 37 members (three Tzomet members defected earlier to join Rabin's government) even threatened Labour, which had lost two members to Avigdor Kahalani's The Third Way, a group opposed to any compromise on the Golan Heights. Though a massive success for Netanyahu, the 1996 elections gained little for Levy in terms of power within Likud–Gesher–Tzomet. The real no. 2 leader in the Likud was now Mordechai, and the right-wing character of the government was clear from the start. Levy also demanded the Foreign Ministry, which he received, even without being blunted by a deputy. He believed that this way he could remain totally in control of the ministry, but instead he was again overshadowed by Netanyahu, who controlled almost every important foreign policy