Dissidents Split Mapam; Party Denounced As Tool of Communists

Dissidents within the pro-Communist Mapam Party today opened offices in the large cities of this country and started a nationwide campaign to recruit new members. The action was taken following the resignation this week-end from the Mapam of two of its leaders, David Livshitz and Hanna Lamdan, both deputies in the Israel Parliament and members of the Achduth Avoda faction of the party. Both asked the praesidium of Parliament to recognize them as an independent group.

They also issued a statement which was a scathing denunciation of the Mapam Party as a tool of the Communists that had betrayed Israeli labor. Mrs. Lamdan, deputy speaker of the Knesset, resigned the post, declaring “I no longer represent Mapam.” A special Mapam Party court tried the two dissidents in absentia and ordered them expelled “for undermining the United Workers Party Mapam.”

The split in the leftist party followed adoption of a policy of support of Egypt against British “imperialism.” In a bitter attack on the Mapam Party, the two dissidents said that “there is hardly a field for independent activity within Mapam which does not call for association with the Communist Party.” The Mapam, their statement charged, “has disappointed all who have supported it. Mapam betrayed the Israeli laborers who believed in its call and its mission.”

The last signs of independence shown by the party, the statement said, disappeared with the dispatch of a mission to East Berlin and the adoption of the pro- Egyptian policy, both of which, the statement charged, were dictated by the Communists. The defection of the two reduces Mapam’s representation in the Knesset from 15 to 13 but it remains the third largest group in Parliament.