Mapai

And it collapsed from a position of total dominance.

Mapai was the dominant force from 1948.

The labor movement basically was the state for the first three decades.

And then 1977 happens, and it loses power, and it never fully recovers.

This is an avant-garde.

And also, me being, you know, a... an offspring of the Mapai philosophy, we don't want facts on the ground dictated by private initiative to guide Israeli policy.

But it's sometimes necessary if if the state is too cumbersome, too lazy, and too phlegmatic to do what it needs to do.

And what it needs to do is declare that anything that stemmed from the defunct Oslo agreement is null and void, and there is no longer anything such as area A, B, and C.

And particularly in Israel, it's like there's extremes of consciousness.

What is a Jewish resident of the land of Israel supposed to be trying to do? The country has been split between, you know, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, it was Mapai versus Herod, you know, something like that.

You know, the right wing against the left wing.

And that split has just gone on, taking different forms in a very extreme way.

Nor were any of them members of this interim government.

In order to contrast this with others, I'd like to point out that despite the hegemony of Ben-Gurion's Mapai, but the early government was a coalition.

And it had representatives from the General Zionists, Mizrahi, the Agudas Yisrael, Mapam, and several other political parties.

And it goes without saying that all of their representatives signed Israel's Declaration of Independence.

And if anything did happen, they wanted it to be in full view of the people of Israel.

Secondly, in the heyday of the...

Mapai Labor Zionists, which was a socialist political party.

So Tel Aviv was seen as a revisionist Zionist stronghold.

And he stayed there for a few years.

Later on, this man became a member and a secretary of the Mapai party.

And he said that it was Rebbe Tzimchanah's kindness that restored his faith in humanity.

This is connected to the message that the Rebbe wrote in today's Hayom Yom, a book which has a message for every day of the year.

right.

Let me drill into this because the Haredi Israeli is culturally profoundly different from the socialist Mapai Israeli of the 50s and 60s.

Just culturally, utterly different.

and really set against in terms of their you know what they imagine a healthy body politics should be in a healthy society should be and the arab jewish divide is profound and deeply meaningful for all the sides half of israelis after about fifty one come from the arab world and they by the way tend to vote much more hawkish toward the arab world much more right wing than the european heritage jews the ashkenazi jews who tend to be overrepresented on the left whereas the mizrahi jews tend to be overrepresented on the right and these are divides that today it's hard for me to imagine i do not have an israeli friend who isn't an intermarriage of several different jewish communities But back then, it was profound, the gap, the difference.

It was almost impossible to talk to each other in any real way.

And the culture and the political parties were also braced not to let the other one in.

The Mapai Ashkenazi establishment made it very difficult for the new Mizrahi immigrants to actually enter the political system.

And the political party right through the parties that ran the country for the first 29 years, which was this socialist left.

So everyone does know the basic story, and the basic story is that the Irgun, um, um, tried bringing in a ship of immigrants, weapons, guns, artillery, ammunition, et cetera.

The Mapai political established leadership wanted to stop them, so they tried to kill them.

Nineteen got killed, and the ship was blown up.

The Irgun could have, and according to some, should have retaliated and fought back, but they were restrained by their fearless leader, Menachem Begin, who stated emphatically that they will never engage in a civil war.

This point cannot be overem-overemphasized, and it will be the primary idea taking us through this entire episode.

The fact that all these pre-state militias were politicized.

The Haganah was associated politically with the labor left-wing Mapai establishment of Ben-Gurion and his team.

David Ben-Gurion, the future Prime Minister of the State of Israel.

Menachem Begin's Likud defeats Labor for the first time, and it was an earthquake.

Labor, or Mapai, as it was earlier, had dominated Israeli politics since before the state was founded.

David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol, every prime minister until Begin came from that Labor-Zionist establishment.

The political divide before 1977 wasn't right versus left on security.