Word: mapai
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Kastner denied that he was a traitor; if he had acquiesced in deaths he could not prevent anyway, it had been in order to save as many Jews as he could. The Mapai Party of Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, embarrassed by the charges because Kastner was a party official and a Mapai candidate for the Knesset, confidently decided to prosecute Gruenwald for libel. For a year and a half the case dragged on, and all Israel bled from this opening of old wounds. In June 1955 Judge Benjamin Halevy ruled that Gruenwald was substantially right. Kastner, said the judge...
Halevy's decision caused the fall of Premier Moshe Sharett's Cabinet, and it was re-formed in bitterness and distrust. Kastner quit his government job, withdrew from the list of Mapai candidates and, a broken man, lived in what he called a loneliness "blacker than night, darker than hell...
Next day in the wire-enclosed Central Elections Committee headquarters in Jaffa, guarded by a posse of police, the votes were counted. The result showed an un expected drift away from Ben-Gurion's moderate Mapai (Labor) Party, a defeat for the more conservative General Zionists, and a surprising tilt towards the extremists of both sides. Shock-haired Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Premier, who became a shepherd and now has returned to shep herd his people, had acted almost as if the premiership would be his by acclamation. Apparently, the present Premier, Moshe Sharett, also a member...
...stricken man in his 70s, he set himself the task of finding out who had betrayed them. Last year, after poring through mountains of yellowed records, he pointed the finger of blame at Rudolf (now Israel) Kastner, by then a citizen of Israel himself, a promising politico in the Mapai Party and an assistant to Cabinet Minister Dov Joseph...
...Many. By the time the trial was done, all the old rifts in Zionist Jewry, the rifts between Left and Right, moderation and extremism, Irgunist nationalism and Mapai Socialism, were rent wide open again. Fortnight ago, the trial judge found Greenwald guilty on one count-that of falsely accusing Kastner of sharing Nazi profits-and fined him one Israeli pound...