Israel: Back into Battle

Celebrating his 79th birthday last week, with his famed burning-bush hair do newly cropped, the patriarch of modern Israel lounged on the lawn in front of his prefabricated house at the Sde Boker kibbutz in the Negev. He accepted gifts of gladioli, roses and wine, together with the traditional Jewish greeting, “You should live to be 120!” “Is that all?” joked David Ben-Gurion.

Good question. For months, Ben-Gurion has been keeping a grueling political schedule that would make a far younger man feel six score years of age. On the day before his birthday, he harangued a crowd of 3,000 in the Red Sea port of Elath on the failure of Premier Levi Eshkol to develop the Negev, then gave a two-hour evening lecture on other Eshkol shortcomings. In prep aration for Israel’s general elections on Nov. 2, Ben-Gurion has founded a new party called Rafi and is seeking to wrest the balance of power in the Knesset (Parliament) from his hand-picked replacement for Premier.

End of the Affair? Just why he has chosen to make the effort is a subject of some controversy in Israel. In 1963 he “retired” to Sde Boker and handed the Premiership and leadership in the dominant Mapai party over to Finance Minister Eshkol. Then, last year he demanded that Eshkol reopen the somno lent “Lavon Affair,” which had begun in 1955, when Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon was fired for his supposed responsibility in an abortive anti-Egyptian sabotage plot—and ended, as far as Eshkol was concerned, when an official inquiry in 1961 cleared Lavon.

Ben-Gurion thereupon, in the interests of securing “justice” for Lavon, broke with Mapai, taking with him a handful of younger politicians including Agriculture Minister Moshe Dayan, 50, and Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres, 42—and wound up naming a complete, 120-man list of candidates for the Knesset. Furious, Eshkol has fought back with the full force of the Mapai organization and with scathing newspaper advertisements that denounce “the old man at Sde Boker” as the prophet who, in the Talmudic phrase, “prophesied and knew not whereof he prophesied.”

Holding the Balance? “B-G” is still vastly popular, as was shown in the September balloting for control of Histadrut, the 860,000-member trade-union federation that also owns factories, synagogues and publishing houses, and provides medical insurance for 70% of the nation’s workers. In the Histadrut election, with 40% of the Israeli electorate voting, Ben-Gurion’s Rafi party won 13% of the vote, while Mapai’s share of the total dropped from 55% to 38%.

If Rafi does as well in the Knesset elections, under Israel’s proportional representation system of voting, Ben-Gurion will command between 15 and 20 seats in the Knesset. This will not make him Premier again, but it will mean he holds the balance of power between the moderately socialistic Mapai, the right-wing Gahal, and the half a dozen smaller, religious, and Arab parties that must be used to form any coalition. It will also mean he is in a good position to dictate a Cabinet to Levi Eshkol.