Herut Conclave Begins to Organize for Likud Victory in Next Elections

The Herut convention, which had a festive ceremonial opening in Jerusalem last night, settled down to work here this morning. Its first order of business was to organize for a Likud victory in next May’s elections when the opposition hopes to unseat the governing Labor Party for the first time in the history of the State. Herut is one of the major components of Likud.

The opening speaker, Gen. (Res.) Ezer Weizman, the newly elected Likud campaign manager, exuded confidence while he cautioned against over-confidence. The road to victory is not easy, he told his party colleagues. “You must work for victory as if victory is certain but in the knowledge that it is hard to achieve,” he said. He stressed that Likud must select only its best candidates for the Knesset and municipalities lists. “Think hard who you will be sending to the Knesset,” he declared.

But Weizman spoke, in the main, as if a Likud-led government was a foregone conclusion. He cautioned U.S. President-elect Jimmy Carter to take into account that if he meets in Washington with Premier Yitzhak Rabin in April, Rabin will be out of a job a month later and Israel will have a Likud government. He also warned Carter not to try to influence Israel’s elections as he alleged Rabin had done in the U.S. elections last November.

Likud has yet to hammer out its election platform, Weizman’s speech contained several surprises, however. While stressing that the Judaea and Samaria regions (West Bank) were not negotiable; he supported territorial concessions on the Golan Heights and in Sinai in exchange for a true peace. He and Likud MK Chaim Landau also called for election reforms, a subject never previously raised at a Herut convention. They said the present system was unfit and must be revised MK Yoram Aridor, head of the Likud faction in Histadrut, discussed economic and social problems.