Summary
The dominant party of the Labor camp and the central party of the Israeli system in the state’s first decades, as Dowty presents it: the vehicle of David Ben-Gurion’s Mamlachtiut and of the majoritarian turn in early statehood (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1330-1474).
Details
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Under the Mandate, Labor Zionists (primarily Mapai at the time) used the Revisionists’ attempted separation to delegitimize their opponents as subverters of Jewish unity in a time of troubles (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 950-973).
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In early statehood majoritarianism appealed to Mapai, the dominant party, since it stood to gain from changes that reduced the need for power-sharing; Mapai remained the largest party throughout the period despite the gap between the Labor elite’s ideology and the public’s more traditional moorings and a huge influx of nonideologized immigrants (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1330-1360).
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Ben-Gurion’s coalitions were constructed so that no single party could bring down the government by leaving, greatly reducing the actual power-sharing required for Mapai to govern; Dowty lists among the era’s fears “little chance for a government without Mapai” (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1420-1474).
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Table 1 of Chapter 4 gives Mapai’s Knesset seats as 46, 45, 40, 47, 42, 45 and 56 at the elections of 1949, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1961, 1965 and 1969, within Labor Zionist bloc totals of 65, 60, 59, 63, 59, 63 and 60 (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1455-1474; the table continues in part 3).
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Dowty instances the era’s heavy-handed paternalism from within Mapai’s leadership: in 1953 Moshe Sharett, one of its more liberal and Western-oriented leaders, supported a cabinet proposal to withdraw citizens’ right to leave the country; at one point security services implanted listening devices in the offices of Mapam, at various times a member of Mapai’s government coalitions (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1440-1474).
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Dowty’s Chapter 4 completion explains Mapai’s electoral stability in 1949-1969 (Labor Zionist bloc 59-65 seats) in institutional rather than ideological terms: immigrant camps and settlements were allocated to parties by the party key, Mapai initially receiving over 50 percent of allocations, and newcomers were funnelled into the Histadrut Sick Fund, which required Histadrut membership (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1475-1520).
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The electorate, Dowty notes, was “voting to the left of its opinions” — a large gap between the Labor Zionist elite’s beliefs and the general public’s — and Labor’s longevity produced bureaucratic ossification and delayed generation change to an Israel-born leadership (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1545-1565).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, David Ben-Gurion, Labor Zionism, Mamlachtiut, Histadrut