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2025-07-22 | 2026-10-05 |
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Foreign Government | Israeli opposition party formed by David Ben-Gurion in 1965 after leaving Mapai, whose campaign against Prime Minister Eshkol turned partly on Dimona; it won ten Knesset seats and merged into Labor in 1968. | 1965 | 1968 | Tel Aviv, Israel |
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Rafi (an acronym of Reshimat Poalei Yisrael, the Israel Workers' List) was a political party formed in 1965 by David Ben-Gurion and a group of his associates after they left the Mapai Party.12
Founding
The Israel Democracy Institute records that the split came from Ben-Gurion's fight to reopen the investigation of the Lavon Affair, his opposition to a joint Mapai list with Ahdut HaAvoda, and his concerns about the leadership of Levi Eshkol; that most of Rafi's members were the young generation of Mapai, including Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Navon; that its platform did not mention socialism and stressed a change in the election system; and that on foreign policy and security it was "more hawkish than Mapai."1 The Encyclopaedia Judaica entry states that seven Mapai Knesset members, later joined by Dayan, formed the new list in July 1965.2 Seymour Hersh dated Ben-Gurion's resignation from Mapai to June 1965, "talking darkly of Eshkol's 'endangering the nation's security'"; he wrote that Peres joined "reluctant but loyal" and became Rafi's "power broker," that Dayan, who had recently resigned as agriculture minister, joined as well, and that Ben-Gurion hoped for as many as twenty-five of the 120 Knesset seats.3
The nuclear issue in the 1965 campaign
Hersh wrote that Eshkol's decision to hold the nuclear question at the research stage, taken at the Midrasha conference, "enraged" Ben-Gurion, who compared him to Neville Chamberlain; that Rafi under Peres took "a more aggressive position across the spectrum of defense issues, and especially on nuclear weapons"; and that Ernst David Bergmann was a founding member who "once again had Ben-Gurion's ear": "Ben-Gurion was quoting Bergmann all the time," an Israeli recalled, about the dangers of not producing a nuclear arsenal.3 According to Hersh the issue was "played out in code language" in the 1965 election. The Israeli newspapers carried criticism by Peres and Ben-Gurion of what was called in Hebrew "the sensitive topic" or "a lament for generations," and Rafi leaders constantly attacked what they called Eshkol's "big mistake," language that many in Israel understood as referring to his hesitations about opening a nuclear weapons assembly line at Dimona. Hersh wrote that American and other newspapers did not report it and that "neither did the American intelligence community" understand it.3 He added that a prominent lawyer close to Golda Meir publicly called Ben-Gurion a "coward" and Rafi a "neo-Fascist group," and that for Ben-Gurion's critics the election was a contest between a state that relied on "science, objective knowledge" and one that relied on dedicated volunteers.3
The party played, in Hersh's phrase, "the role that had traditionally belonged to right-wing groups"; the Israel Democracy Institute records that because Rafi did not join the coalition it "acted in cooperation with" Gahal.13
Results, the Six-Day War and the merger
Rafi received 95,328 votes, 7.9 percent, and ten of the 120 seats in the November 1965 Knesset election, after winning 12 percent of the vote in the Histadrut elections of September.12 Hersh wrote that Ben-Gurion and Rafi "were sorely disappointed by the election," that it amounted to "a brutal referendum on his dream of returning to power, and the end of his role in the public policy of Israel," and that Eshkol took it as a referendum on his handling of the nuclear issue, after which Dimona "would remain a standby operation."3 The party's founding convention in May 1966 represented about 23,000 members and adopted a program of electoral reform, defense self-sufficiency, national health insurance, free secondary education and economic modernization with an emphasis on science.2
On the eve of the Six-Day War of June 1967 Rafi and Gahal pressed for Dayan's appointment as defense minister; both joined the national unity government of Eshkol, and Dayan became minister of defense.1 On January 21, 1968 Rafi, Mapai and Ahdut HaAvoda formed the Israel Labor Party, Rafi receiving 21.5 percent of the places on its governing bodies; Ben-Gurion's separate State List, "composed largely of Rafi supporters," won four seats in the 1969 elections, was renamed the Rafi-State List in February 1971 and in 1973 ran as part of the Likud Party bloc.2 See Labor Party.
Footnotes
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Israel Democracy Institute, "Rafi (The Israeli Workers List)," Elections and Parties (founding, leaders, 1965 result, Six-Day War cabinet). https://en.idi.org.il/israeli-elections-and-parties/parties/rafi ↩︎
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Louvish, Misha, "Rafi," Encyclopaedia Judaica, on Encyclopedia.com (July 1965 list, Histadrut and Knesset results, May 1966 convention, State List, merger of January 21, 1968). https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/rafi ↩︎
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Hersh, Seymour M., The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, chapter 10, "The Samson Option," pp. 138-141. Full text read at https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option ↩︎