Minister of Agriculture General Moshe Dayan, former Israeli Chief of Staff, apologized to his colleagues in the Israel Cabinet yesterday for having sent a personal message of congratulations to those responsible for the explosion of an atomic bomb in the French Sahara, it was disclosed today.
Mr. Dayan also expressed regrets to his colleagues because he published a signed article in the newspaper Maariv in which he said that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had informed him of the Prime Minister’s plan to have talks with President Eisenhower and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer before others had been informed.
Cabinet members affiliated with the Mapam and Achdut Avodah parties lashed into Mr. Dayan for his action–disclosed in another one of the former general’s newspaper articles–that he had sent a personal message of congratulations to those responsible for the French atomic bomb test.
Minister of Development Mordechai Ben-Tov and Minister of Transportation Yitzhak Ben-Aharon insisted that it was not proper for Dayan to have sent this message since, they argued, it would be assumed that such messages automatically were approved by the Cabinet. In view of the criticism, Dayan apologized to the entire cabinet for having made the report public in his newspaper article.
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