Mapam’s Central Committee decided by a comfortable margin today that Mapam will remain within the Labor Alignment for the May 17 elections but will conduct a thorough re-examination of its relationship with the Labor Party six months thereafter.
Those were the terms of a resolution approved by 58 percent of the Central Committee following a day of heated debate on the issue of whether to stay in the Alignment or go it alone. The resolution, drafted by the faction’s leadership bureau, was based on proposals by veteran Mapam leader Yaacov Hazan.
The party’s Secretary General, Meir Talmi, who favored quitting the Alignment, said in an interview afterwards that he accepted the resolution in the interests of Socialist unity in what is expected to be the toughest election in Israel’s history.
The matter came to a head only hours before the deadline for filing Knesset lists. Mapam had agreed to remain in the Alignment when the Labor Party re-elected Premier Yitzhak Rabin its leader at its convention in February. Prior to the convention, Mapam had stated that it would leave the Alignment if Labor chose Defense Minister Shimon Peres to stand at the head of its list.
The issue was revived by Rabin’s resignation last Thursday as Labor Party leader because of the bank account he and his wife kept in Washington, D.C. in violation of Israel’s currency laws. After the selection of Peres to replace Rabin yesterday, many Mapam leaders felt the new situation justified Mapam leaving the Alignment.
ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF ALIGNMENT
The Central Committee seemed to be evenly divided during the day and the Leadership Bureau was deadlocked by an 8-8 tie vote with one abstention. Hazan’s proposal apparently turned the tide in favor of continuing the partnership with Labor, especially since Hazan originally favored leaving the Alignment in the event that the Labor list was headed by Peres. Talmi himself warned against the “ideology of Peres” which he claimed was closer to that of Likud than Mapam. But the party’s political secretary, Naftali Feder, warned that a split in the Alignment could make a Likud victory possible on May 17.
The same argument was used, apparently to good effect, by a succession of Labor Party leaders during the past 24 hours in an effort to preserve the Alignment. They included Peres, Foreign Minister Yigal Allon and former Foreign Minister Abba Eban.
SHARON ON VERGE OF REJOINING LIKUD
Meanwhile, Gen. (Res.) Ariel Sharon, who quit Likud to form his own Shlomzion faction, was reported today to be on the verge of rejoining Likud. He was reportedly offered the sixth place on its Knesset list and promised that three other Shlomzion candidates would be fitted in between the 42nd and 50th places on the list. The Shlomzion faction, torn by internal dissension, has not succeeded in attracting any broad constituency and Sharon was said to be close to accepting Likud’s offer.
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