On an Island

Until late into the night, air-raid wardens last week rapped on the doors of Israeli homes, but the new state was not beset by air raids. Israel was getting ready for its first general election. The wardens had been pressed into service to distribute identity cards to the voters. This week, over 400,000 people were expected to go to the polls to elect a Constituent Assembly. The Assembly's 120 members* in turn would write Israel's constitution and act as Israel's parliament. With the Arabs defeated, it remained to be seen how Israel's Jews, who have come together from all corners of the globe, would manage to live in one country.

Women in Purdah. Israel's first election campaign rumbled along in good ward-political style. Politicians fought each other tooth & nail for the limited campaign facilities. Parties accused each other of renting all the public halls in Tel Aviv although they had no intention of actually using them; one party was accused of trying to catch the Rumanian immigrant vote by leasing Tel Aviv's only Rumanian printing press.

Through the last weeks of the campaign, Israeli cities were full of blaring loudspeakers and glaring posters. Cafe campaigners revived an old joke: "Eight men were stranded on a desert island. The two Britons did not speak to one another for six months because nobody introduced them. The two Scotsmen formed a Robert Burns Society. The two Irishmen killed each other fighting. And the two Jews organized five political parties."

In Israel last week, 21 separate parties were campaigning for seats in the new Assembly, among them a Party of the Partyless Orthodox Women. (Orthodox Jews in Israel had objected to the revolutionary notion of women mixing in politics.)

Israel's strangest splinter group was composed of 33,000 Palestinian Arabs, who had full rights to vote and to put up their own candidates, although their campaigning was restricted. (They need travel permits, and may not hold public meetings in areas occupied by the Israeli army.) Last week in Arab Nazareth, Moslem women complained that their religion forbade them to be photographed for identity cards or to lift their purdahs for identification at the polls in the presence of men. After some head-scratching, the government's election committee decided that Arab women could vote without having their pictures taken. Furthermore, there would be a special force of female poll watchers before whom the Arab women voters could lift their veils.

The Big Four. Four major parties stand out in the Israel campaign:

1) Mapai, the mildly socialist party of Premier Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok, which roughly corresponds to Britain's Labor Party. It favors "democratic" socialism, limited Western orientation, peace with the Arabs. It is generally expected to win, though not by as large a margin as Ben-Gurion and Shertok are fighting for. It has optimistically nominated 118 candidates for the 120 posts to be filled. "The other two places," cracked Israelis last week, "are for the opposition."

2) Mapai's important rival, Mapam (United Workers Party), which claims to be nonCommunist, although its platform sounds like Radio Moscow: "We are against bases and concessions to imperialism; we are for an alliance of the progressive forces headed by Russia!"

3) The "Religious Front," which campaigns (with little hope of success) for a state based on the law of the Torah. Two of its chief planks: strict observance of the Sabbath, and a ban on importation of nonkosher meat.

4) The "Freedom Movement," Israel's newest and potentially most dangerous party, led by Menachim Beigin, former commander of Irgun. Frankly jingoist, it demands a Jewish state including all of Palestine. Cried Beigin last week: "It is not a real peace while . . . the Arab legions stand on the Hill of the Holy Temple." His party violently denounces Ben-Gurion's peace efforts, attacks him as a seeker of power and prestige. "Have you heard?" runs one joke launched by Beigin's party: "Stalin is having delusions of grandeur. He walks up & down, beating his chest and saying: 'I am Ben-Gurion. I am Ben-Gurion.'"

Ben-Gurion's followers promptly retorted with a shot at Beigin: "Do you know," they asked, "why Beigin can't lose? He has the only Fascist movement in history that isn't anti-Semitic."

* The number was chosen to correspond to the membership of the Jews' last "Great Assembly," which met (according to Jewish tradition) in the 5th Century B.C. Its legislative work is summarized in its exhortation: "Be cautious in pronouncing judgment, have many pupils, and build a fence around the Torah."

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