Representatives of the opposition parties yesterday ripped into Premier Ben Gurion’s statement of policy to the Knesset last Tuesday and Wednesday. His two-part analysis of Israel’s internal and foreign policies, both past and future, was the target of Mapam, Herut and General Zionist attacks.
Opening the debate, Mapam leader Israel Bar Yehuda asserted that the Premier had failed to submit an over-all economic plan for the country, but had substituted instead an announcement of a project to plant millions of trees which, he said, “hardly qualified as an economic plan and certainly would not solve the country’s difficult problems.” Mr. Bar Yehuda also attacked the government for its “inclination” to accept a suggestion by the Palestine Potash Company that it sell its concession for Dead Sea mineral exploitation–which has fifty-five years to run–to the Dupont Corporation of America. He charged that such an action “would be detrimental to the country’s interests and would be liable to lead to a severs economic crisis.”
Herut leader Menachem Beigin expressed fear that the coalition government’s failure to draft a constitution might result in that government remaining in office beyond the four-year term stipulated by the Knesset. He announced that his party would present a motion in the Knesset demanding that a constitution be adopted before the end of 1949. He attacked the government’s devaluation of the Israel pound (from $3.00 to $2.80) and also lashed out at the austerity policy, which he charged “famishes” the population and will produce a generation of invalids.
Dr. Fritz Bernstein, General Zionist leader, declared that the “single fact” which he had learned from the Premier’s statement of policy was that the government does not plan to modify its present economic policy. He criticized that policy because it was an attempt, he said, to achieve “socialism in our time.” He expressed concern over the “growing deterioration of the economic situation” and took the coalition government to task for failing to absorb 100,000 immigrants who are still in transient camps.
Pinchas Lubianiker, top ranking Mapai deputy, charged that Mr. Beigin and other opposition spokesmen, by their “libellous propaganda,” were causing capital to flee the country. He asserted that the government’s present economic policy was a system in which private capital and “collective labor initiative” were dovetailed.
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