The Ghost Goes East

In Israel, where no party has a majority and the government must rule by coalition, the junior partners usually find an issue to quarrel about shortly before election time in order to break away from the coalition and be free to campaign on their own. Last week, as the days drew nearer to the November elections, two left-wing parties in Premier David Ben-Gurion's four-party coalition found a really emotion-charged issue to fight about: Israel's deal to sell $3,300,000 worth of grenade launchers to West Germany (TIME, July 6). This is a lively subject in a nation that remembers Nazi concentration camps and frowns on playing Wagner on the radio.

In one of the most powerful parliamentary speeches of his career, white-thatched old (72) Ben-Gurion, dressed in his familiar open-necked shirt, assailed his critics for deliberately stirring up anti-German feeling. He cited Cabinet minutes to show that the leftist parties' leaders approved last December the deal they now denounced as "selling arms to the devil."

Cried B-G: "Do not defile the memory of the slaughtered millions in the campaign you have started here, which everyone knows is an electoral campaign." Defending the contract, he said: "I have learned one thing from the appalling atrocities of Hitler: to make every possible effort to prevent such a disaster falling on the people of Israel. For although Hitler was defeated, his disciples in the Middle East still live, and it is they who rule in the Arab countries that surround us. Israel does not belong to any alliance. We, more than any other nation, need friends. The Germany of today is not the Germany of Hitler, and I refer to the geopolitical transformation that has taken place in Western Europe. It is our duty to adopt all measures to safeguard our peace and security."

With the help of the conservative General Zionists, B-G carried his vote 57 to 45. But the two leftist parties in his coalition voted against the motion. Lacking constitutional power to sack members of his own Cabinet, but denouncing what he called a "breach of faith" by the four leftist ministers, B-G stormed out of a Cabinet session roaring: "This is the last time I sit with them." At week's end he resigned, as he had six times before in the past eleven years. By law, ministers are then supposed to stay on as a caretaker government until the next elections. In this case, unforgiving Premier Ben-Gurion might designate the four leftists as ministers without portfolio so that he can keep them out of his Cabinet meetings.

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