Word: mapai
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Israel's first general election since 1955, Ben-Gurion's Mapai (Labor) Party had not only defended its No. 1 position against 20 rival parties, but boosted its strength in the 120-member Knesset from 40 to at least 47 seats, a gain the campaign manager himself had ruled out beforehand as "impossible." "The fight of the 20 against one has ended with the complete failure of the 20," crowed Ben-Gurion. His nimbus of white hair awhirl, the old (73) warrior jubilantly raised a glass of vermouth, proclaimed his victory toast: "To life...
However poorly socialists may have fared electorally of late elsewhere, there was plainly lots of life yet in the collective farmer of Sde Boker and his Mapai Party. They had won new security for their country by the Sinai military campaign against Egypt exactly three years ago last week, and encouraged a new prosperity for their merchants by relaxing their stiffest controls. They had brought a flood of newcomers (and new social problems) from Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Iran. And they had convinced the young and the newly arrived of their party's forward look by running such attractive, vigorous...
...assure "Oriental" (i.e., non-European) immigrants that the Mapai Party would fight to break down social divisions in Israel springing from which people arrived first in the country, Dayan, Peres and Ben-Gurion himself campaigned door to door through Tel Aviv slums. Cape Town-born Abba Eban, who had never lived in Israel before his return from the U.S. last summer, got off to an awkward start by turning up in statesman's coat and tie for a Mapai rally at which Ben-Gurion and everybody else on the platform wore open-necked shirts. As quickly as was diplomatically...
Despite Ben-Gurion's personal popularity, people were beginning to grumble, and last week they could be heard. The occasion was the election of a new Speaker of the Knesset (Parliament). First indication of trouble to Ben-Gurion's ruling Mapai (Labor) Party was the refusal of popular ex-Premier Moshe Sharett to make the race. Mapai put up a second-string candidate instead. He was beaten. The strong right-wing Herut Party ganged up with minor leftist parties in Ben-Gurion's own coalition to elect 75-year-old Nahum Nir, onetime head of the Polish...
...Jordan River demilitarized and guarded by U.N. troops. In the course of a Knesset debate last week, Ben-Gurion would only add: "All President Nasser knows and needs to know about Israel is that we are opposed to any entry of foreign troops into Jordan." Next day his Mapai Party newspaper Davar floated a sly balloon: "Who knows whether Nasser is not prepared to submit to Israel's entry into Jordan up to the west bank of the Jordan River as a price for his own entry into Amman and the final liquidation of the Hashemite dynasty...