News Brief

WEISMAN: SECRET DEAL REACHED

With the Religious Zionists of America (Mizrachi) deferring its vote, Weisman said, the Hadassah proposal failed to achieve the 70 percent majority necessary for passage. Two days later, however, Mizrachi cast its vote in favor of the plan, giving it the required majority, he said. Weisman asserted that Mizrachi’s affirmative vote came only after it was drawn into a secret “inter-party agreement” guaranteeing a predetermined distribution of 116 delegates to the Congress from among American Zionist organizations, The agreement was reached, the ZOA declared in its appeals, at a late-night “rump meeting,” attended by representatives of Hadassah, the United Labor Zionist Organization of America and Mizrachi, that was held after the Committee’s formal meeting on Sept. 8 had adjourned.

The decision agreed upon at this private meeting. Weisman said, “makes a mockery” of a 1970 resolution of the Zionist General Council, governing body of the World Zionist Organization, calling for “democratic polling with the participation of all organized Zionists.

He said the World Zionist Organization Executive and the Congress Tribunal have been informed in his organization’s appeals that the ZOA has consistently favored “democratic ballot box elections” to the Congress. Weisman claimed that the ZOA is being “foreclosed” from fair and appropriate participation in the Congress by the action of Israeli leaders of the Labor Zionists and Mizrachi who, at the secret meeting, “improperly influenced and coerced” the other Zionist groups to opt for a mail ballot and a “private arrangement” of the distribution of the 116 US delegates.

He did not identify the “Israeli leaders.” Weisman said the Tribunal will now require the groups named in its appeal to file written answers to the complaint within 30 days. The API-HH, in its statement issued by Moshe Kagen, chairman of the group and a vice-chairman of the AZF, declared that the AZF “was given mandates to democratize the American Zionist movement” to involve “American Jewish youth in an active role in the decision making bodies of the AZF” and to give American Jews “an opportunity to be part of the Zionist endeavor by holding secret, democratic elections for the American delegation.” Kagen added that none of the resolutions adopted at the AZF founding convention have been “made available to the press, to the public, to the delegates of the convention, nor to the constituent bodies.”