About 100 members of the Liberal Party’s Central Committee turned up for a meeting here last night to protest proposals by Liberal ministers in the unity coalition Cabinet for an outright merger with Herut.
Herut and the Liberal Party constitute the Likud bloc, but as separate entities, each with its own internal party organs. Each draws up its own list of candidates for Knesset elections which are combined in a bargaining process between the two factions to present the voters with a single list labeled Likud.
Herut is the larger of the two factions and it prevailed upon the Liberals before the last elections — held July 23, 1984 — to accept a smaller ratio of “safe” seats and Cabinet posts. Herut has long been in favor of merger. But many Liberals fear it would mark the end of their party as a political entity and stifle its political and ideological aims which, in many respects, differ sharply from those of the more militant Herut.
None of the Liberal ministers who favor merger attended last night’s meeting and they put strong pressure on their colleagues to cancel it. The turnout of 100 Central Committee members, little more than a third of its 247 members, was considered satisfactory by the organizers. Leon Dulzin, chairman of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization Executives, is one of the leading opponents of merger with Herut.
He joined with Liberal mayors of several large cities to urge that merger negotiations now under way be suspended until the party’s long overdue national convention. Conventions are scheduled every three years but the Liberals have held none in five years.
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