Ritual Day

In Israel, politics, like the struggle for survival, can be bitter. Charges and countercharges by the 18 rival parties were almost as explosive as the bombs which blasted a candidate's home, a political rally and an election meeting. But Election Day last week was a ritual as solemn as any that democracy provides. People wore Sabbath clothes, and there was a Sabbath-like quiet in the air. Some 800,000 voters, half of whom cannot speak or write the language of the country with any fluency, entered the polling booth, carefully selected a slip bearing that let ter of the Hebrew alphabet symbolizing their chosen party, inserted it into a thin brown envelope and, emerging, dropped it into the ballot box in the presence of election inspectors.

For thousands it was their first experience in democratic procedure. In the new immigrant village of Ta'oz in the Judean hills, a fragile-boned Yemenite, who a year ago had been forced to step off the pavement of his native town if an Arab went by, cast the first vote of his life. Down in the Negev, the Bedouins in their black cloaks tethered donkeys and camels outside the polling stations, stood patienlly alongside their Jewish neighbors, waiting their turn. Brooklyn's Grand Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, of the Congregation Yetv Lev, in an effort to persuade Orthodox Jews not to take part in secular elections, was offering $15 worth of scrip, good for luxury foodstuffs, if they would stay away from the polls. But in Jerusalem's Orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim, bearded and ringleted men with memories of East European ghettos were praying for wisdom before making their choice.

Next day in the wire-enclosed Central Elections Committee headquarters in Jaffa, guarded by a posse of police, the votes were counted. The result showed an un expected drift away from Ben-Gurion's moderate Mapai (Labor) Party, a defeat for the more conservative General Zionists, and a surprising tilt towards the extremists of both sides. Shock-haired Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Premier, who became a shepherd and now has returned to shep herd his people, had acted almost as if the premiership would be his by acclamation. Apparently, the present Premier, Moshe Sharett, also a member of Mapai, was all set to step aside for Ben-Gurion, who is presently Defense Minister in Sharett's Cabinet. Now, if Ben-Gurion does try to form a government, he will need all his tact (which is in short supply) even to achieve a stable governing coalition. Mapai got 39 of the Knesset's 120 seats, compared to 45 in the last election. The Herut, successor to the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, was now the second largest party in the Knesset, an upset that was widely regarded as a sign that the voters want a more aggressive border policy.

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