Members of a Mapam delegation now in the United States–comprising Y. Zerubavel and Zvi Lurie, members of the Jewish Agency executive, and Knesset deputy Dov Barnir–today issued a statement calling on “official representatives of the Israel Government here (to) deny” the “false statement” attributed in press reports to Premier David Ben Gurion of Israel in which he was quoted as saying that the present struggle in the Histadrut between the Mapai and the Mapam is a “life-and-death struggle between Socialist-Zionism and Communism.”
The Mapam delegation’s statement added that if the Premier’s remarks were accurately reported, (then) “we accuse the Prime Minister of irresponsible distortion of fact. The struggle between Mapai and Mapam is not a ‘struggle between Socialist-Zionism and Communism’ but between diluted Socialist-Zionism and true Socialist-Zionism,” the delegation’s statement added.
The delegation declared that the “Israel Communists have always been against immigration, colonization, against Zionism and the ingathering of exiles, (and) the attempt to compare or even to fabricate an analogy between them and perhaps the most constructive and Chalutz movement, Mapam, is not only a distortion of truth, but an attempt to bring direct harm to our movement.”
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