Mapai Court of Honor Ends Hearings on Expulsion of Ben-gurion Group

The Mapai Court of Honor ended its hearings on arguments to expel former Premier David Ben-Gurion and six of his followers for creating an independent list for the November Parliamentary elections, and announced today it would issue a ruling Monday.

Two more of the six Mapai leaders who joined with Mr. Ben-Gurion to form the Israel Workers List (Rafi) to challenge Premier Levi Eshkol’s leadership at the polls–Amos Degani and Gideon Ben-Israel–told the Court they no longer considered themselves Mapai members. Earlier, Yizhar Smilansky, one of the accused, formally resigned from the party.

The four other Rafi leaders–Mr. Ben-Gurion, ex-Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres, former Housing Minister Josef Almogi, and Hanna Lamdan–said yesterday they were withdrawing from the Court hearings because the tribunal had made their defense against charges of splitting the party “impossible.”

The final session yesterday was marked by an impassioned statement by Yaacov Shapiro, attorney for the Mapai prosecution. He charged that Rafi was a “neo-fascist group based on the leader principle.” He asserted that Mr. Ben-Gurion had “attempted to set himself up as more equal than others,” when he appeared before the Court last week. The prosecuting attorney quoted from George Orwell’s satire, “Animal Farm,” in which one of the animals which drove out their human masters, to establish self-government, justified setting up a dictatorship on grounds that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Nahum Shadmi, head of Mapai’s Control Commission who appeared with Mr. Shapiro for the prosecution, told the court that “despite his achievements, Ben-Gurion has evidenced all signs typical of a dictator, and he is a danger to Israel society.”

Micha Kaspi, the Rafi attorney, announced he was withdrawing from the case. He told the tribunal that there was no point in his continuing, since the Court had rejected his demand to call Premier Eshkol, Foreign Minister Golda Meir, and other Mapai ministers as witnesses for the defense. The attorney, however, asked that the court continue its deliberations.