This article is about the historical party that was dissolved in the 1970s. For the current political party originally known as Rakah, see
Maki (political party)
.
Political party in Israel
Maki
(
Hebrew
:
????
, a
Hebrew abbreviation
for
Hebrew
:
?????? ??????????? ????????
,
romanized
:
HaMiflega HaKomunistit HaYisraelit
,
lit.
'Israeli Communist Party') was a
communist
political party
in
Israel
.
History
[
edit
]
Maki was a descendant of the
Palestine Communist Party
(PCP), which changed its name to MAKEI (the Communist Party of
Eretz Yisrael
) after endorsing partition in 1947, and then to Maki. Members of the
National Liberation League
, an Arab party that had split from the PCP in 1944, rejoined Maki in October 1948, giving the party both
Jewish
and
Arab
members, while the
Hebrew Communists
also joined the party. The party took over publication of two communist newspapers,
Kol HaAm
(Hebrew) and
Al-Ittihad
(Arabic). The party was not
Zionist
, but recognized Israel, though it denied the link between the state and the
Jewish diaspora
, and asserted the right of
Palestinians
to form a state in accordance with the
United Nations
resolution on partition.
In the
first Knesset elections
in 1949 the party received 3.5% of the vote and won four seats, which were taken by
Shmuel Mikunis
,
Eliezer Preminger
,
Tawfik Toubi
and
Meir Vilner
. During the session, Preminger left the party and re-established the
Hebrew Communists
before joining
Mapam
.
In the
1951 elections
Maki received 4% of the vote and won five seats, with
Emil Habibi
and
Esther Vilenska
entering the
Knesset
. During the session, the
Prague Trials
of 1952 caused the pro-Soviet
Labour Zionist
Mapam to break with the
Soviet Union
. Unhappy at the decision, Mapam members
Avraham Berman
and
Moshe Sneh
left Mapam and set up the
Left Faction
before joining Maki. The party was also involved in the fall of
Moshe Sharett
's fifth government, when it and
Herut
brought a motion of no confidence over the government's position on the trial of
Malkiel Gruenwald
, who had accused
Rudolf Kastner
of collaborating with the Nazis.
In the
1955 elections
, Maki's share of the vote increased again as it won six seats in the Knesset. It launched a Polish-language newspaper,
Walka
, in 1958. However, the
1959 elections
saw the party perform poorly, winning only three seats.
The
1961 election
campaign was helped by the ruling coalition's involvement in the
Lavon Affair
, and Maki gained five seats. However, during the early 1960s tensions within the party intensified between the largely Jewish faction of Moshe Sneh and Shmuel Mikunis, which considered Israeli national interests and accepted Israel's right to exist, and the mostly Arab faction of Meir Vilner, which accepted the Soviet pro-Arab and anti-Zionist stance without reservation.
[1]
The internal disagreements finally led to a split in 1965, with Sneh's faction retaining the name Maki, while the pro-Palestinian faction (Toubi and Vilner) left to form
Rakah
("New Communist List"), which the Soviet Union recognised as the "official" Communist Party. It was reported in the Soviet media that the Mikunis?Sneh group had defected to the bourgeois-nationalist camp.
[2]
The
1965 elections
were a disaster, with the party winning only one seat, while Rakah won three. Maki supported the
Six-Day War
in 1967, and then went on to repeat its poor performance in the
1969 elections
, winning just a single seat. The party merged with the
Blue-Red Movement
in 1973 to form
Moked
, and subsequently disappeared as an independent party. Moked won one seat in the
1973 elections
. Later it became part of
Left Camp of Israel
(in 1977), then
Ratz
(in 1981).
In the meantime, Rakah had become the leading force in the
Hadash
alliance, which it joined in 1977. In 1989, several years after Maki's demise, Rakah changed its name to Maki. Party leaders asserted at the time that their party, rather than the rival faction that merged among the forces of the Zionist Left, had the better claim upon the historic heritage of what the name stood for in the 1950s and early 1960s.
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Коммунистическая партия в Израиле
Jewish Encyclopedia in Russian
- ^
Mezhdunarodnaya Zizhn
?cited in edition
Valispanoraam 1972
, Tallinn, 1973, lk 147 (
Foreign Panorama 1972
)
External links
[
edit
]
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Parliamentary
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Extra-
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Defunct
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