Samuel Mikunis

Samuel Mikunis (1959)

Samuel Mikunis ( Hebrew שמואל מיקוניס; born August 10, 1903 in Polonnoye ; died May 20, 1982 in Tel Aviv ) was a communist Israeli politician and a Knesset MP from 1949 to 1974 .

Life

Mikunis was born into a Hasidic family in Podolia , part of the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire , which is now part of Ukraine . He was active in the Zionist middle school student association he-Chalutz ("The Pioneer") and went to Palestine in 1921, which was then under British rule . From 1925 to 1930 he worked as an actor and secretary for the theater group ha-Ohel ("The Tent"). He then went to France and completed an engineering course there. From 1933 to 1945 he worked for the Shell Oil Company in Palestine on British military bases and in road construction.

He joined the Communist Party of Palestine and in 1939 became secretary of the Central Committee and editor-in-chief of the party newspaper Kol ha-'am ("People's Voice"). In 1944 he was elected to the assembly of representatives of the Jewish population in Palestine under the British mandate ( Asefat ha-Nivcharim ). As recently as 1944, the Communist Party of Palestine rejected Jewish immigration to Palestine at its 8th party congress . When the Comintern was dissolved in 1943 and Moscow's control over the party loosened, the party split after lengthy clashes into a more Arab-Palestinian and a more Jewish-Prozionist part. The former went to the National Liberation League in Palestine ( Arabic عصبة التحرر الوطني في فلسطين) on; the latter formed the Israeli Communist Party (Maki). Mikunis was one of its founding members and would serve as its secretary until 1974. In 1947, as a representative of the Maki, at a conference of the communist parties of the British Empire in London , he demanded recognition of the national rights of the Jewish population in Palestine; Emil Habibi attacked him sharply for this and demanded equal rights for Jews and Arabs in Palestine. During the Palestine War in 1948, Mikunis went to Eastern Europe as the party's envoy to procure weapons and recruit volunteers for the Zionist troops.

Mikunis was a member of the Zionist Provisional State Council and was elected to the first Knesset on a Maki list . He was re-elected in 1951, 1955, 1961 and 1965, with the Maki faction in the Knesset merging into one seat in 1965 following a split in the party (from which the Rakach emerged ).

In 1965, in an article in the Hebrew language Kol ha-'am , Mikunis protested against the award of the Lenin Prize to Ahmed Ben Bella ; the Arabic-language party newspaper al-Ittiḥād ("The Unity") refused to publish a translation of his article. Tensions in the party escalated and eventually led to a split. The faction around Meir Wilner , which adhered closely to the line of the Soviet Union and was very critical of the policy of the Israeli government at the time, formed the New Communist List (Rakach); the faction around Samuel Mikunis and Moshe Sneh compared them with the line of the Mufti Amin al-Husseini , emphasized the independence from the Soviet Union and founded their own party. As a result of the split, Mikunis lost his seat in the Knesset in 1969, but was re-elected MP in 1972 to replace Moshe Sneh. Towards the end of the legislative period Maki concluded with the Blue-Red movement of Meir Pa'il the party Moked together ( "Focus") and Mikunis lost his seat in parliament finally in the elections of the 1,973th

In 1974, Mikunis resigned as general secretary of the party because the party had come too close to Zionism. He joined the Israel Communist Opposition (Aki) founded in 1973 by Ester Vilenska .

In Tel-Aviv a street was named after Samuel Mikunis.

Works

• The politics of the Communist Party of Palestine. Adopted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Palestine , August 1945 (brochure).
• Where is the State of Israel going? In: From the international labor movement , 14/1957.

Web links

• Samuel Mikunis. In: Knesset Members. Knesset , accessed March 21, 2018 .