Old Man's Victory

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion went to bed early. Turning on the radio next morning at his desert cottage at Sde Boker, he heard the news at breakfast that he had won another election. Then his campaign manager helicoptered in from Tel Aviv to tell him he had won the biggest triumph of his political career.

In Israel's first general election since 1955, Ben-Gurion's Mapai (Labor) Party had not only defended its No. 1 position against 20 rival parties, but boosted its strength in the 120-member Knesset from 40 to at least 47 seats, a gain the campaign manager himself had ruled out beforehand as "impossible." "The fight of the 20 against one has ended with the complete failure of the 20," crowed Ben-Gurion. His nimbus of white hair awhirl, the old (73) warrior jubilantly raised a glass of vermouth, proclaimed his victory toast: "To life!"

However poorly socialists may have fared electorally of late elsewhere, there was plainly lots of life yet in the collective farmer of Sde Boker and his Mapai Party. They had won new security for their country by the Sinai military campaign against Egypt exactly three years ago last week, and encouraged a new prosperity for their merchants by relaxing their stiffest controls. They had brought a flood of newcomers (and new social problems) from Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Iran. And they had convinced the young and the newly arrived of their party's forward look by running such attractive, vigorous new candidates as former Army Chief Moshe Dayan, 44, former Ambassador to Washington Abba Eban, 44, former Defense Planner Shimon Peres, 36.

To assure "Oriental" (i.e., non-European) immigrants that the Mapai Party would fight to break down social divisions in Israel springing from which people arrived first in the country, Dayan, Peres and Ben-Gurion himself campaigned door to door through Tel Aviv slums. Cape Town-born Abba Eban, who had never lived in Israel before his return from the U.S. last summer, got off to an awkward start by turning up in statesman's coat and tie for a Mapai rally at which Ben-Gurion and everybody else on the platform wore open-necked shirts. As quickly as was diplomatically possible, Eban stripped to his shirtsleeves and scored a smashing comeback by appealing for votes with U.N.-style eloquence in Arabic, Spanish, French, Persian and Hebrew. Peres and Eban are now in line for top government posts, and Ben-Gurion makes no secret of the fact that he would like to see one-eyed General Moshe Dayan, the man with the eye patch, his successor one day.

Grateful but not completely satisfied by the size of his victory, Ben-Gurion hopes to coalesce with two small center parties so that he can have an absolute majority to put through an electoral reform his heart is set upon. He would like to abolish proportional representation in favor of a U.S.-type system in which deputies would be elected from individual constituencies. The result, Ben-Gurion believes, would be to cut down the number of parties, and permit a more stable system of governing what he complains is a "nation of Prime Ministers."

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