 The first such election, in 1996 had been an extremely tight contest between Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu on the right, and Labor's Shimon Peres on the left; the right had won by less than one percent (about 29,000 votes).Ehud Barak, promising to storm the citadels of peace regarding negotiations with the Palestinians and withdraw from Lebanon by July 2000, won the election in a landslide victory.In the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, although the Likud government had negotiated the Wye River Memorandum and it had passed the Knesset overwhelmingly in November 1998, subsequent negotiations with the Palestinians were going badly.