Word: mapai
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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...
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...
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...