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Mapam

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aliasesUnited Workers Party

3 min read

Summary

The Zionist Marxist party whose activists, in Manna’s Chapter 3, were the League’s chief allies and defenders inside Israel, held two interim-government ministries, and played an important role in the Czechoslovak arms deal (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.128, 131, 138).

Details

  • Mapam members in the Palmach/Haganah carried out several massacres and expulsions, a role the League’s October 1948 publication obfuscated in order to lift the Zionist left to a class ally (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.123).

  • League cooperation was overseen with Marxist comrades in the communist and Mapam parties, coordinated in part by Tawfiq Tubi (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.128).

  • The interim cabinet included two Mapam ministers (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.131).

  • Mapam activist Eliezer Be’eri defended the League in ‘The Nazareth Scandal’ and Mapam’s Aharon Cohen defended special treatment for League men, stressing its abundant fruit for Israel in 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.135).

  • Mapam leaders were the biggest supporters of the policy favouring the communists, including help for comrades returning from Lebanon (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.137).

  • Mapam and Maki strongly opposed territorial ‘concessions’ for peace near the end of 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.144).

  • Maki supported Jewish settlement on depopulated village lands including settlements established by Mapam Marxists on land of Kufr Bir’im and Sa’sa’ (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.146).

  • Ben-Gurion excluded Mapam as well as the communists from his first government (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.147).

  • Chapter 7’s remainder (part 8): Mapam’s Arab vote stayed small — 3,300 votes (5.6 percent) in 1951; Eliezer Be’eri argued its failure owed less to Mapai pressure than to its own factors, since still heavier pressure on Maki had not stopped the communists winning 10,000 Arab votes (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.273).

  • Its Arab standard-bearer Rustum Bastuni, elected to the second Knesset, edited al-Mirsad from September 1951 and doubled the party’s Arab vote to about 6,000 by 1955, but was dropped after criticising the party for refusing Arabs equal membership while building kibbutzim on depopulated villages’ lands (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.282-283).

  • After the first elections Mapai fired Mapam-member military governors and replaced them with ruling-party men, and abolished the minorities ministry whose Mapam activists had aided the communists (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.275).

  • In 1955 Mapam joined the governing coalition as Israel headed toward war with Egypt; in the 1956 war it adopted the government’s hostility to Nasser while Maki sided with Egypt, and the two parties, on the same path since 1948, separated into different camps (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.283).

  • In 1959 Mapam capitalised on Maki’s clash with Nasser — its activist poet Rashid Husain wrote the famous article “When History Grows Hungry” — and jumped to second place among Arab voters, ahead of Maki for the first time (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.288).

Nakba and Survival, Maki, National Liberation League, Aharon Cohen

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