Labor Alignment Starts Trading for Coalition

(Continued from Page 1)
party emerges with 50 seats
in the new Knesset against 56
in the old.
The Likud bloc will have 39
seats against its previous 32;
and the National Religious
Party will remain about the
same, with 12 seats, although
early returns indicated that it
may have lost one seat.
The other member of Pre-
mier Meir's old coalition, the
Independent Liberals headed
by Moshe Kol, seems to have
picked up a seat, giving them
five in the new Knesset
against four in the old.
The pro-Moscow Rakah
Communists appear to have
added one seat to their pre-
vious three. The new Moked
bloc, comprising pro-Zionist
Maki Communists and non-
Communist leftist intellec-
tuals, scored only one seat
which is what Maki held in
the old Knesset. The soldiers'
vote could possibly give it
an additional seat.
Mrs. Shulamit Aloni, who
defected from the Labor
Party to form her own Inde-
pendent Civil Rights list, ap-
pears to have won two seats,
better than expected. The ul-
tra-Orthodox Aguda - Poalei
Aguda bloc, running on a
single ticket, lost one of their
six seats.
The splinter parties — old
and new—fared poorly and
none of them attained the
1 per cent of the vote re-
quired for a Knesset. seat.
But, again, the army vote
could conceivably pull one or
more of them over the top.
Losers include Uri Avneri,
the flamboyant editor of Hao-
lam Hazeh magazine and his
one-time associate and now
bitter foe, Shalom Cohen.
Avneri ran on the Meri list,
a small coalition of leftist
peace advocates which failed
to gain 1 per cent of the

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vote. Cohen headed the
Black Panthers, a loose coal-
ition of slum dwellers of Ori-
ental extraction. Several
other Oriental (Sephardic)
splinter lists, all bitter rivals,
managed to defeat one an-
other without gaining a single
seat.
The Blue-and-White Pan-
thers also failed to make the
Knesset nor did Dr. Avner
Sciaky, a defector from the
National Religious Party, win
the minimum vote for his in-
dependent list.
Another loser is Rabbi Meir
Kahane whose militant Jew-
ish Defense League was thor-
oughly disliked and distrusted
by both government and op-
position voters as a menace
to Arab-Jewish harmony.
Monday's turnout of voters
was higher than expected,
considering the election eve
polls which showed a large
percentage of the electorate
undecided. It was estimated
that more than 80 per cent of
the eligible voters had cast
ballots by the time the civil-
ian polls closed at 11 p.m.
Army polls sayed open until
midnight and in some cases
probably longer.
(Before the tallying of the
soldiers' vote, Justice Haim
Cohn, chairman of the Israel
Central Elections Committee,
announced that 1,194,496 had
voted. There are some 200,000
in the armed forces whose
balloting was yet to be re-
ported upon).
As of Wednesday, the Arab
vote was largely unknown.
Israeli Arabs presented two
pro-Labor, one pro-Likud list
and one independent list. A
significant number of Arabs
appear to have voted for the
Rakah Communists which
may account for their appar-
ent gain of one seat. The
Arab Rakah vote appears to
have been at the expense of
Labor.
The poor showing of the
Aguda bloc was attributed to
the objection of many ultra-
Orthodox voters to the shaky
marriage between Agudath
Israel and Poalei Aguda Is-
rael. In the religious township
of Bnet Brak many voters
marked ballots with the let-
ter Gimel for Agudath Israel
instead of the letters Gimel-
Dalet for the combined list.
At Poalei Aguda kibutzim,
voters did the opposite. In all
cases, those ballots were
voided.
The Moked list, headed by
Meir Payil, made small but
important gains among the
major kibutz movements af-
filiated with the various La-
bor factions and Mapam. In
Mapam kibutzim--the Kibutz
Ha'artzi Movement — Moked
scored as much as 7 per
cent of the vote which is re-
garded as a protest against
Mapam's continued affiliation
with Mrs. Meir's Labor
Alignment. Moked won 2.7
per cent in Kibutz Meuhad
(Ahdut Avoda) kibutzim and
2.3 per cent in kibutzim af-
filiated with Mapai (Ichud
Hakvutzot Vehakibutzim).
It is expected that within
a matter of days Israel
President Ephraim Katzir
will ask Mrs. Meir to accept
the responsibility of forming
a new government.

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The Leadership Mood

BY YITZHAK SHARGIL
JTA Chief Tel Aviv
Correspondent
TEL AVIV (JTA)—The sig-
nificance of election returns
was reflected in the moods
that prevailed 'at the head-
quarters of the two major

contestants — Labor and Li-
kud. The atmosphere at La-
bor headquarters was sub-
dued. But Premier Golda
Meir and her ranking minis-
ters who watched the returns
on television were apparently
braced for their party's loss-
es—although the dropping of
six Knesset seats was clearly
more than they would have
liked—and confident that they
could still form a - viable coal-
ition government.
At Likud headquarters, the
feeling was generally one of
satisfaction but hardly a vic-
tory atmosphere. Likud ap-
peared to have picked up six
seats and may have as many
as 40 in the next Knesset—a
formidable opposition but not
enough to end 25 years of
Labor rule.
Mrs. Meir who sat through
the returns chain-smoking
and expressionless, was visi-
bly irritated when Avraham
Offer, head of the Labor
Alignment's Knesset faction,
told a television interviewer
that the results so far were
so indecisive that a new elec-
tion may be called for.
"Who told him to say
that?", the premier shouted.
Later, on her instructions,
Labor Party Secretary Gen-
eral Aharon Yadlin appeared
on television to declare that
Labor regarded the election
results as a clear mandate
from the public to establish
a new government based on
the party's previous coalition.
It was a reference to the Na-
tional Religious Party and
the Independent Liberals.
Yadlin insisted that the
election results represented
no historic change. "Even if
Likud wins 40 seats in the
Knesset, it would still have
only one-third," he said. He
admitted that Labor's
strength declined but said
that had been expected and
declared that "there is a
sound basis for setting up a
stable government and no
need for new elections."
He said his party's task
was to establish a new cabi-
net under Premier Meir as
quickly as possible. •
The Labor Party leadership
was clearly unhappy, how-
ever, over its upset defeat in
the Tel Aviv municipal elec-
tions which placed the con-
tinued rule of Mayor Yeho-
shua Rabinowitz in doubt.
Likud leaders were buoyed
by their substantial gains de-
spite being branded the "war
party" by their opponents.
According to Menahem Be-
gin, leader of Likud's militant
Herut wing, the election re-
sults denied a mandate to
those who he said would "re-
partition" Israel. "There is a
clear majority for those who
wish to retain our rights in
the western part of Pales-
tine" (West Bank), he said.
He referred to 38-40 Likud
seats plus "17 Religious Par-
ty seats in addition to Labor-
ites opposed to returning the
Judea-Samaria region to the
Arabs."
But Begin obviously was
overestimating the strength
of the "No Return" faction.
The NRP will have no more
than 12 seats and the Aguda
bloc, which lost one of its six
seats, is not bound, as is the
NRP, to the "Greater Israel"
borders.
Begin added, and probably
correctly, that with her mar-
gin in the Knesset reduced
from 56 to 50 seats, Premier
Meir would not dare to seek
Rakah Communist support
for reduced borders.
Elimelech R i in a 1 t and
Shmuel Tamir, leaders re-

spectively of Likud's Liberal
and Free Center factions, ob-
served that while halving the
Knesset gap between Labor
and Likud Was a great
achievement, it fell short of a
Likud victory.
Six Arabs—four of them
Moslems, one a Druze and
one a Greek Orthodox Chris-
tian—will have seats in the
eighth Knesset, the same
"Arab quota" as in the pre-
vious Knesset. This numer-
ical stability, however, by no
means reflects a no-change
outcome of the polls in the
Arab sector. On the contrary
—behind the figures lies a
fundamental change in the
political structure of Israel's
Arab minority. And it is a
change for the worse. The
next government, overbur-
dened with other problems as
it certainly will be, will have
to spend time and effort for
a comprehensive review of
the new situation in this sen-
sitive sector.
There is one element of
this disturbing picture over
which there can be no argu-
ment: the 75 per cent turnout
in the Arab sector was the
lowest since the 1951 elec-
tions. This unusual apathy
stemmed apparently from
the war and its aftermath.
Israel's image of invincibility
was tarnished in the eyes of
its Arab citizens. Quite a few
chose therefore to ignore the
elections altogether, thus re-
cording their protest against
the very existence of the
state. And of those who did
vote many more than pre-
viously reached the same con-
clusion, casting their ballots
for the anti-Zionist Rakah
Communist Party which is
heavily colored by Arab na-
tionalist tendencies. An esti-
mated 45,000 Arabs voted for
Rakah. The party appealed to
the Arab electorate with a
campaign for immediate Is-
raeli withdrawal to the 1967
lines and its demand for self-
determination for the Pales-
tinians, as well as with prom-
ises to fight "repression" of
the minority at home.
Rakah recovered from the
3 per cent setback it suf-
fered in the Histadrut elec-
tion earlier in the year. It
gained more than 20 per
cent and added a fourth

Knesseter to its previous
three.
In fact, Rakah won a ma-
ority in most of the major
Arab villages of the triangle
and lower and western Gali-
lee, including an impressive
victory in Nazareth.
The Labor Alignment re-
ceived some 63,000 Arab

votes in all, compared to Ra-
kah's 45,000. Of these 24,000
went directly to the Align-
ment ticket, 17,000 to a new
(Continued on Page 9)

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