The central committee of the Mapai Party met here tonight to elect a new Secretariat after the Tel Aviv District Court issued an injunction on Friday, forbidding the Secretariat to function on the grounds that the Ben-Gurion supporters in the top group had not been invited to a meeting of the Secretariat. As a result of the court order, the entire Secretariat resigned as a body.
The injunction had been granted on the application of the dissident Ben-Gurion faction, the Israel Workers List, which is campaigning separately from Mapai for election to the Knesset (Parliament) in next November’s balloting. The Ben-Gurion group told the court that not only had its adherents been excluded from invitations to the Secretariat meeting, set to finalize the expulsion of the Ben-Gurion members from the party, but that a Mapai Court of Honor does not have the “competence” to vote the scheduled expulsions. The latter claim was not decided by the court, which has been scheduled to resume a hearing on the merits of the issue tomorrow.
Explaining the Secretariat’s mass resignation, Reuben Barkatt, secretary-general of Mapai, said the Secretariat cannot function properly while the Ben-Gurionists “undermine its work from the outside and the inside.” It was generally believed that the new Secretariat to be chosen by the central committee will exclude all Ben-Gurion adherents.
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