Aryeh Eliav, a veteran Labor Party member and its former secretary general, announced this week that he was quitting the party because of his long time differences over policy and the quality of its leadership. He said at a press conference that he would retain his Knesset seat as a one-man independent faction.
Eliav’s doveish views kept him frequently at loggerheads with former Premier Golda Meir and her government after the Six-Day War. He told journalists gathered at the Sokolow House that in his opinion the Labor Party is presently a total desert where no well of ideology or stream of ideas and thinking can exist. He criticized the Labor Party’s current leadership and that of the immediate past. He charged the party with indulging in extravagances and actions ill befitting a workers movement.
Asked why he chose to quit at this time, Eliav said his disgust with the party’s chasing of public loans to pay its debts and his votes against the party line in the Knesset led to a confrontation which decided him that the time had come to leave its ranks. Eliav was a member of Haganah in his youth and was active in the clandestine immigration movement during the British Mandate era. He was assigned to Moscow as a diplomat but was declared persona non grate there because of his Zionist activities.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
