A new political group whose leadership includes former members of the Labor Party and Mapam, became a formal political movement today and joined forces with Likud. The movement’s leaders insisted, however, that they were not abandoning their Laborite ideology and christened their new faction “The Labor Movement for Greater Israel.”
According to Moshe Shamir, a former member of Mapam, the new movement joined Likud in order to stress the importance of a common political front for the idea of a Greater Israel–the annexation of all of the administered Arab territories. Gen. Avraham Yaffe (Res.) a former Hashomer Hatzair member who heads the new movement, said that he scrutinized the Likud program “and I can assure every Mapam member that he can sign it and remain a good and true socialist.” He added that “to define Likud as right-wing or reactionary are empty words.”
In addition to Shamir and Yaffe, leaders of the Labor Movement for Greater Israel include Dr. Haim Yahil, a Labor Party member and former director general of the Foreign Ministry; Tzvi Shloah, a former member of the Mapai and later of the Rafi faction of the Labor Party; Dov Yossefi, a former member of Mapam; and Dr. Yayir Sprinzak, son of the first Speaker of the Knesset.
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