Summary
Secretary of the Israeli Communist Party who, in Manna’s account, represented it in the interim government, travelled with Emile Habibi to Belgrade and Prague, and led the Jewish communists whose conditions governed the October 1948 merger into Maki (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.128, 141).
Details
- Mikunis and Habibi travelled together to the Belgrade conference of communist parties; party member Wolf Erlich was at the Yugoslav consulate securing a similar visa service for Mikunis (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.128).
- Habibi claimed Mikunis invited him to Prague and that he knew nothing of the Czech arms deal; Manna asks whether the trip could have had no knowledge or Moscow coordination (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.128).
- At the beginning of March 1948 the party was invited to join the interim government and Mikunis was chosen to represent it in the cabinet; the party’s representative was a signatory to Israel’s declaration of independence (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.128, 131).
- According to his own testimony as summarised by Manna, Mikunis was coordinating with Ben-Gurion on one side and the USSR on the other, which played an important role in speeding up the Czech arms supply deal at the end of March 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.149).
- The October 1948 unity conference was not a union of equals but an acceptance of the Jewish communists’ conditions under Mikunis’s leadership (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.141).
- On the thirtieth-day anniversary of Eliyahu Gozansky’s death Mikunis published ‘Eliyahu Gozansky: the Man and His Deeds’ in the party press (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.142).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Maki, Emile Habibi, Czechoslovak arms deal