Word: ben-gurion
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...coalition, the junior partners usually find an issue to quarrel about shortly before election time in order to break away from the coalition and be free to campaign on their own. Last week, as the days drew nearer to the November elections, two left-wing parties in Premier David Ben-Gurion's four-party coalition found a really emotion-charged issue to fight about: Israel's deal to sell $3,300,000 worth of grenade launchers to West Germany (TIME, July 6). This is a lively subject in a nation that remembers Nazi concentration camps and frowns...
...most powerful parliamentary speeches of his career, white-thatched old (72) Ben-Gurion, dressed in his familiar open-necked shirt, assailed his critics for deliberately stirring up anti-German feeling. He cited Cabinet minutes to show that the leftist parties' leaders approved last December the deal they now denounced as "selling arms to the devil...
...This is the last time I sit with them." At week's end he resigned, as he had six times before in the past eleven years. By law, ministers are then supposed to stay on as a caretaker government until the next elections. In this case, unforgiving Premier Ben-Gurion might designate the four leftists as ministers without portfolio so that he can keep them out of his Cabinet meetings...
...stream of weapons to rearm the German army," cried a Tel Aviv newspaper. Israel had contracted to sell 250,000 anti-tank grenade launchers worth $3,300,000 to West Germany's Bundeswehr. Even coalition parties in the government demanded cancellation of the contract, and Premier David Ben-Gurion faced a no-confidence vote in parliament. Threatening to resign if he did not get his way, Ben-Gurion defended the deal in this fashion: "I distinguish between the Germany of yesterday and the Germany of today...
Another attractive candidate being groomed by 72-year-old Ben-Gurion: one-eyed Major General Moshe Dayan, 43, former army chief of staff and hero of Sinai. Ben-Gurion packed him off 13 months ago to Hebrew University to catch up on his education after years of fighting; he has since flunked several subjects, is still hard at work making up for the schooling gaps in a busy soldier's life...