1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle July the IDF appointed Yigal Allon to head the operation, and Yitzhak Rabin, who became Israel's prime minister in 1974, as his operations officer; both had served in the Palmach, an elite fighting force of the pre-Israel Jewish community in Palestine. The operation was carried out between 9 July 1948, the end of the first truce in the Arab-Israeli war, and 18 July, the start of the second truce, a period known in Israeli historiography as the Ten Days. Morris writes that the IDF assembled its largest force ever: the Yiftach brigade; the Eighth Armored Brigade's 82nd and 89th Battalions;
Yitzhak Rabin with the PLO. From 1990 to 1992, Rabin again served as a Knesset member and sat on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. In 1992 Rabin was elected as chairman of the Labor Party, winning against Shimon Peres. In the elections that year his party, strongly focusing on the popularity of its leader, managed to win a clear victory over the Likud of incumbent Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. However, the left-wing bloc in the Knesset only won an overall narrow majority, facilitated by the disqualification of small nationalist parties that did not manage to pass the electoral threshold. Rabin formed