Deputy Prime Minister Abba Eban accused the David Ben-Gurion faction of Mapai, which announced yesterday that it was officially committed to run an “Israel Workers List” in the next elections to parliament, of being “secessionists”
Addressing a Mapai meeting last night at Rehovot, Mr. Eban said that “the gravity of what the secessionists have done to Mapai lies not only in the fact that they left their party, but in their abandonment of the basic principle of democracy, majority decision.”
He referred to the fact that Mapai’s Central Committee had supported the party’s Secretariat in ruling that no member of Mapai could retain membership if he participated in the formation of a list to oppose the Mapai list in the forthcoming elections.
At the same time, former Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres told a group of Ben-Gurion followers at Beersheba: “Israeli citizens are being educated to conformism. We want changes in Israeli society. We are not forming a Mapai-in-reverse, we are not constituting a retroactive Herut, we are not a Stalinist Mapam. We are an Israeli party, the cleanest party in Israel. We have no fedings of revenge, but of faith, though Mapai, in fact, deposed Ben-Gurion, who is the greatest living Jew.”
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