A ruling party in the making: Mapai in the 1948 war

Abstract

The article discusses the transformation of Mapai, the main political party in Israel’s pre-state years, into the ruling party of a sovereign state. By way of doing so Mapai went through three distinct stages, from striving to build a working class of rural and urban labourers, to seeking immediate statehood via rapid mass immigration and partition, to acting as an effective ruling party, or the ‘party of the state’ as it called itself, following the November 1947 UN partition resolution. It was in charge of creating the machinery of government during a time of war, and this fostered hierarchical patterns characteristic of a sovereign rule, notably the independence of the government vis-à-vis the political parties, including Mapai itself.