Knesset Defeats Opposition Motion on Sale of ‘shalom’ to West Germany

Israel’s Parliament met in special session today at the request of the opposition and defeated two agenda motions concerning the sale of the liner SS Shalom and the annual report by State Controller Y.E. Nebenzahl which accused the Government of waste in a number of fields.

The sale of the Shalom to a West German firm, which was approved by the Cabinet last week, was protested by Yosef Almogi, a member of former Premier Davit Ben-Gurion’s dissident Israel Workers Party (Rafi), and by Dr. Yohanan Bader of the Gahal alignment of Liberals and Herut. Almogi asserted that the price obtained for the liner of $15,250,000 was “too low.” He said also he understood that Zim Israel Navigation Company, the owner, had received offers to rent the ship for lengthy periods which would have made it possible to keep the liner under Israel’s flag with an Israeli crew. Bader asserted that either the Government had made a mistake in acquiring the Shalom three years ago or had made an error now in selling it.

Transport Minister Moshe Carmel, replying for the Government, said that it had cost $10,000 a day to maintain the Shalom and that to cover those costs, almost every berth would have had to be sold, a goal which was never accomplished. He said that the liner had cost the Government more than $2 million a year in subsidies and that to keep losses down even to that level, it was necessary to rent the liner out for pleasure cruises in the Caribbean for most of the year. What this amounted to, he said, was that the Israel Government had in fact been subsidizing American tourists.

He said that when the Shalom was ordered in 1959, transatlantic, passenger travel had been on the increase but that by the time the Shalom was ready in 1964, commercial jet airlines had taken the lion’s share of the traffic and plunged passenger carrying into a crisis. The Government was compelled to sell the liner, which had cost $17,800,000. for $15,250,000.

The Minister also said that the passenger service of Zim would not be liquidated completely. He noted that Zim currently owns 105 ships with a total displacement of 1,300,000 tons and that 11 more ships were being built for Zim most of them giant transports.

The question of the Controller’s report was raised by Joseph Saphir of Gahal who said the Knesset should take a stand against remarks by Treasury officials critical of the report. Both motions were defeated by the coalition majority and the Members of Parliament returned to their homes to continue their Passover recess. The Controller’s report had severely criticized government allocations of budgetary reserves, export quotas, low port productivity, expensive road building and unexplained government loans.