Ben-gurion Reported Yielding to Mapai Pressure Not to Resign

One of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s twin battles in the Lavon Affair, which have posed the threat of a Cabinet crisis, appeared near solution today under pressure of the Prime Minister’s Mapai party colleagues.

Last minute efforts by the Mapai negotiators persuaded the Prime Minister to cancel plans to submit his resignation to President Ben-Zvi and to prepare another letter in which he would withdraw his criticisms of the seven-man Ministerial Committee which cleared Pinhas Lavon, the Histadrut secretary-general, of responsibility for a 1954 security mishap.

While negotiations on the retraction by Mr. Ben-Gurion of his criticism which Cabinet members regarded as insulting continued during the day, the Security and Foreign Affairs Committee of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, approved today the findings of the Ministerial Committee clearing Mr. Lavon.

The Prime Minister had made the threat to resign in a bid to force his Mapai-dominated Cabinet to reverse its vote of approval for the report of the Ministerial Committee. His criticisms of the committee members were made in a lengthy statement he made last week. Other parties in the coalition took the stand that the criticisms were tantamount to a position of no-confidence by the Prime Minister in his coalition partners and they in turn threatened to resign.

The continuing negotiations on the phraseology of the second letter involved a demand by Cabinet members that the letter contain a specific retraction of the Prime Minister’s charge that the Ministerial Committee report represented “bias, half-truths and a miscarriage of Justice.” The Prime Minister had proposed that the letter simply state that he had no intention of casting doubts on the honesty of the seven Cabinet members who served on the committee.

BEN-GURION MEETS WITH CABINET MEMBERS ON COMPROMISE PROPOSAL

The efforts to work out a settlement through such a letter were led by Finance Minister Levi Eshkol who first persuaded the Prime Minister not to submit his letter of resignation. Mr. Eshkol then invited Justice Minister Pinhas Rosen, a Progressive party leader who headed the Ministerial Committee, and Minister of the Interior Moshe Shapiro, a Mizrachi leader, to meet with the Prime Minister. That meeting took place today.

Assuming the-successful outcome of the efforts to pacify all concerned with a letter to President Ben-Zvi, there remained the other dispute–the personal battle waged by the Prime Minister against Mr. Lavon. This struggle reportedly had reached the stage of the Prime Minister declining to agree that Mr. Lavon should remain in his Histadrut post. Several newspapers mentioned today the name of Aharon Becker, head of the Histadrut’s trade union department, as a possible successor to Mr. Lavon.

Scores of Hebrew University students staged a “defense of democracy” demonstration today on the university campus in protest against the tactics of the Prime Minister’s supporters against Mr. Lavon. The students carried posters bearing slogans similar to the theme of the declaration signed last week by a large number of Israeli intellectuals which warned the Prime Minister’s supporters that their anti-Lavon campaign might lead to autocratic rule in Israel.

The Prime Minister himself, during his meeting today with Mr. Eshkol, Mr. Rosen and Mr. Shapiro, reportedly said the intellectuals were doing him an injustice in presenting him as a “threat to democracy.”