Tass, the Soviet news agency, reported today that a delegation of the pro-Arab Communist splinter party in Israel declared, after a meeting in Moscow with Soviet ideologist Mikhail Suslov, that Israel’s policies were a crime against the cause of peace and against the vital interests of the Arab and Israeli peoples.
The delegation also reportedly said the splinter group condemned Israel’s rulers for “supporting United States imperialism against the Arab states.” The stand was in sharp contrast with that of Israel’s other Communist splinter, which during the June crisis and war appealed to the Soviet Communist Party to seek to induce President Nasser of Egypt to ease his blockade of the Strait of Tiran, which was a key factor in the outbreak of war on June 5.
The Israeli delegates were Meir Wilner, the secretary of the party’s politburo and Twefik Toubi, secretary of its central committee. The conference, which was held last Tuesday, was attended by Suslov, a member of the Soviet politburo, and Boris Ponomarev, secretary of the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party, who has special responsibility for relations with foreign Communist parties.
Wilner and Toubi, according to the Tass report, also expressed their full support for the “consistent steps of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Government to strengthen peace and international security in the Middle East, to uphold the just cause of the Arab peoples in the face of aggression.” The Tass statement added that participants in the meeting agreed that “Israel troops must pull out of the seized territories to the positions they held before June 5.”
The Communist Party in Israel split in August, 1965, after months of struggle between the two wings of the party — the largely Jewish section, favoring a more moderate policy toward the Israel-Arab conflict, and the largely Arabic group, which often followed an extreme Nasserite position before the June war.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
