Begin will stay on despite vote

Two Palestinians killed in occupied territories

By Arthur Max, Associated Press

Begin will stay on despite vote — Stamford Advocate, 24 March 1982 — Stamford Advocate · Stamford, Connecticut · 24 March 1982

Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM — Israel’s Cabinet rejected Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s offer to quit after a tie vote in Parliament on a no-confidence motion, spurred by the military crackdown on Palestinian rioters in occupied Arab territory.

The 58-58 vote yesterday in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, had brought the government to the verge of collapse because Begin had threatened to resign if he did not get a clear vote of confidence. Four Knesset members were absent.

‘The Cabinet has just decided to reject the prime minister’s proposal whereby he would have gone to the state president and tendered his resignation,’ Cabinet Secretary Aryeh Naor said.

The decision came during another day of Palestinian rioting in the occupied West Bank of the Jordan River and Gaza Strip, territories seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Two more Palestinians were killed and eight wounded in fresh violence in the occupied territories today, raising the toll to four dead in six days of anti-Israeli protests.

The military also reported that Israeli troops captured three Palestinian guerrillas from Lebanon near Hanita, a border settlement six miles east of the Mediterranean. They were seized without a firefight, apparently on the Lebanese side of the border.

In Cairo, Osama el Baz, a top adviser to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, asked Israel to exercise self-restraint in the West Bank to spur chances for a negotiated settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Yesterday, Israeli troops on the West Bank fired guns into the air, smashed padlocks on stores of striking shopkeepers and tear-gassed rioters who lobbed stones, blocked roads and burned tires. Four soldiers and four Palestinian youths were reported injured in those disturbances.

A curfew was imposed on the Gaza town of Rafah, where Palestinians rioted over charges an Israeli soldier raped a teen-age girl. The military strongly denied the accusations.

The unrest began after a West Bank Palestinian mayor was fired last week for refusing to cooperate with Israel’s new civilian administration in the area, which many Arabs regard as Israel’s step toward granting Palestinians only limited autonomy. Militant Palestinians want total independence.

The alliance of opposition parties that sponsored the no-confidence motion denounced the Cabinet’s 12-6 decision to reject Begin’s resignation. Moshe Shal, chairman of the Labor Party, the largest opposition bloc in Parliament, said the Cabinet’s action would just ‘stave off the inevitable end.’

The 68-year-old prime minister, re-elected to a second term last June, has enjoyed immense support in the Jewish state because of his militant stand against anti-Israeli Arabs and the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella group of guerrilla factions fighting for an independent Palestinian state.

But his conservative government’s harsh treatment of militant Palestinians in the occupied territories has been increasingly criticized not only by Arabs but by moderate Israelis and by the United States, Israel’s main ally.

Begin is also criticized by extreme right-wing groups opposed to Israel’s scheduled April 25 pullout from the Sinai Desert, which is being returned to Egypt under terms of the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

Although the no-confidence motion focused on government action in occupied territories, it also criticized the government’s handling of other issues ranging from foreign relations to the economy.”

Context added by this archive

The main headline is whether an Israeli prime minister keeps his job. The deaths are the second line. The copy underneath carries the cause of the unrest in Rafah, which is an accusation of rape that the military denied, and the cause of the unrest in the West Bank, which is a mayor fired for not cooperating.

Cite this item

"Begin will stay on despite vote," Stamford Advocate, 24 March 1982. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-033. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-033