A Month in the Country

In most nations, when the head of state takes a holiday the people relax. But not in Israel. Bushy-haired, brittle-tempered Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion habitually uses the threat of a holiday to intimidate his opponents and bring dissident leaders of his ruling Mapai Party back into line. Last week Ben-Gurion did it again.

The spur for the leave-taking was the Lavon affair (TIME, Nov. 7), a five-year-old governmental scandal that has grown as complex and abstruse as a learned commentary on the Talmud. Polish-born Pinhas Lavon was Israel's Defense Minister until 1955, when he was forced from office for what has been mysteriously described as a "disastrous affair'' in the previous year.-- Lavon loudly denied responsibility, insisted he had been framed by two of Ben-Gurion's proteges: Army Chief Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, Director General of the Defense Ministry.

The affair has since widened and proliferated to include arguments about Israel's future economic state, government decentralization and the role of Histadrut, the nation's powerful labor federation, which is now led by Lavon. Most importantly, it involves the question of who is eventually to succeed 74-year-old Ben-Gurion as Prime Minister. Lavon, who is only 56, plainly considers himself available.

Order for Affair. In October, a judicial commission investigating the tortuous Lavon affair heard a senior official admit he had arranged the forging of a letter that said Lavon gave his approval to the "disastrous" operation. The decision last week was passed on to the Cabinet. Ben-Gurion angrily insisted that Lavon, who admittedly helped plan the affair even if he did not order it into operation, should not be allowed to get off scot free and leave patriotic army officers holding the bag.

The Cabinet meeting grew stormy.

Four of the eight Mapai members defied Ben-Gurion; three others--including Moshe Dayan, one of the accused--said they would abstain. Foreign Minister Golda Meir, a potent force in Mapai, grew so angry that she wrote out her resignation, was persuaded to withdraw it, and then stalked out of the meeting. So did angry Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. By a vote of no, the remaining ministers cleared Pinhas Lavon.

Loud Whisper. The Cabinet decision brought a prompt announcement that Ben-Gurion would take a four-week holiday from his job. The Prime Minister's aides whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear that the vacation would be followed by Ben-Gurion's resignation if the Cabinet did not reverse itself. Mapai Party leaders went into a desperate huddle and promised to think of something that would pacify their chief.

Ben-Gurion's holiday gambit may work as well this time as it has in the past, with the Cabinet begging him to return.

But there were signs that perhaps it has been tried once too often. Grumbled a top party leader: "B-G is getting touchy in his old age. He's a lonely man with no real personal friends. Maybe a short rest will do him good." Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had enough zeal left last week to take on another opponent. Rising to address the 25th World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, he poured out a 100-minute torrent of poetic and apocalyptic Hebrew. Despite the Zionists' impressive efforts in helping create Israel twelve years ago and the nearly $500 million they--and other Jews abroad --have pumped into it since, Ben-Gurion belabored them as cowards and false friends. He described Zionism as "the scaffolding needed to build the state" and then snapped, "there is no need for it now." Instead of money and good advice, cried Ben-Gurion, the Zionists should provide Israel with trained and competent Jewish immigrants from the West. Because the flow of Jews to Israel has dwindled to 25,000 a year, "we are short of manpower." Of the hostile Arab nations surrounding Israel, Egypt alone is growing 24 times as fast. What is more, the new immigrants are mostly dark-skinned, backward Oriental Jews from the Middle East and, unless they are leavened 'by Westerners, he said, nothing can prevent Israel from "developing into a Levantine state." World Jewry owes Israel a debt, he declared, because "there is no doubt that the state has straightened the backs of Jews in every country. ' Ben-Gurion was especially annoyed because not one topflight U.S. Zionist leader has settled down in Israel, and because immigration from the West has never been more than a trickle. "In the free and prosperous countries," warned Ben-Gurion, Judaism "faces the kiss of death, a slow and imperceptible decline into the abyss of assimilation!" Ben-Gurion, whose devotion to Judaism as a religion is something short of wholehearted, did not scruple to quote Jewish scripture for his own purposes. Every day spent abroad, he pointed out, violates the precept of the Talmud that says, "Whoever dwells outside the land of Israel is considered to have no God."

Five hundred Zionist delegates from Western countries were grim. World Zionist President Nahum Goldmann, who has threatened to resign if Ben-Gurion does not stop attacking him, admitted sadly that the goal of Zionism is not fulfilled when "less than one-fifth of the Jewish people is concentrated in its homeland." But Rose Halprin, U.S. acting chairman of the Jewish Agency, said flatly: "Mass immigration from the United States is just not in the cards. We will make schizophrenics of our children if we tell them they are not living in their real homeland, that their homeland is really on the other side of the ocean."

* The Jewish Chronicle, Britain's foremost Jewish weekly, reported that the "disaster" was the 1954 breakup by Egyptian police of an Israeli spy ring--one member committed suicide, two were hanged, six sentenced to prison.

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