Victorious Disaster

Israel's general election last week was conducted in a peculiar mood of pettishness and bad temper. In one Galilean village, 201 ballots were invalidated because they proved to be one-fifth of an inch smaller than regulation size. Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem refused to enter a polling place that had once been a Christian church and still bore across. Tel Aviv election officials were shocked when voters, en route to the beach, voted while wearing bikinis and swimming trunks.

Absence of Issues. Irascible Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had forced the election by resigning in a huff last January after his coalition Cabinet had exonerated former Defense Minister Pinhas La von of responsibility for a 1954 security scandal (TIME, Nov. 7). After pushing through his seventh resignation from the post of Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion forced his Mapai Party to dismiss Lavon as secretary-general of the powerful Histadrut labor federation. The vendetta promised to provide plenty of campaign fireworks. Instead, there was a closing of Mapai ranks. Ben-Gurion refused to discuss the Lavon case on the hustings. And Lavon himself, instead of campaigning against Ben-Gurion, simply faded from the scene by taking a long vacation.

In the absence of issues, and with the whole country concentrating on the Eichmann trial.* Israelis could scarcely be blamed for election apathy. One of the nation's 15 political parties even dropped out of the race before election day because it had nothing special to offer the voters. Still Ben-Gurion stumped the land, promising pay raises to workers and civil servants and boasting of national progress. In a whirlwind 24-hour period, he finished his campaign by speaking in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa before going off to Sde Boker, his retreat in the Negev desert. He went confidently to bed before the polls closed, slept soundly until 7 next morning. Said his admiring wife Paula: "Ben-Gurion is like a radio. When he wants to go to sleep, he closes down. When he wants to rise, he opens up."

Limping Along. It was not the happiest of awakenings. Ben-Gurion found that though his Mapai Party remained the most powerful in the nation, it had lost five of its 47 seats in the 120-member Knesset. He called the vote a "victory" for Mapai but a "disaster" for Israel. Long opposed to the nation's proportional representation (he wants a U.S.-style two-party system), Ben-Gurion explained: "I've often said that, for me, 40 or 60 seats in the Knesset is the same thing. Only with a majority of 61 can the electoral system be changed." Until that distant time, Israel must limp along with its collection of splinter parties and partnership governments. At week's end, Ben-Gurion set about negotiating for a coalition Cabinet that with luck might hold together--at least until his next resignation.

*Israelis also pondered the closing words of Eichmann's lawyer, Dr. Robert Servatius, who warned that such barbarism as the Nazis' slaughter of the Jews had happened often in the past, "and it will happen again." Replied one of the judges: "I trust you are being overpessimistic."

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