Thirteenth Government of Israel

President Zalman Shazar entrusted Levi Eshkol with forming a government on November 28, 1965, following the November 2 elections to the Sixth Knesset, in which the Alignment for the Unity of Israel's Workers returned 45 seats.[1][2] After coalition negotiations through December and January, Eshkol informed the president and the Knesset Speaker of the government's composition on January 10, 1966, and presented the new cabinet to the Knesset on January 12.[1] The official Israeli government roster identifies this as the Government of Levi Eshkol, the thirteenth government, with a term running from January 12, 1966, to March 17, 1969, and records that it was formed at President Shazar's residence.[3]

When Eshkol presented the government, he said it comprised the Alignment for the Unity of Israel's Workers, the National Religious Party, the United Workers' Party, and the Independent Liberal Party.[1] The government list records 18 ministers at the outset.[4] At that initial strength, the coalition held 75 of the Knesset's 120 seats.[5] Among the original ministers were Yigal Allon (labor), Zalman Aranne (education and culture), Abba Eban (foreign affairs), Pinhas Sapir (finance), Israel Galili (minister without portfolio), and Eshkol himself as both prime minister and minister of defense.[6] The broader roster also included Mordechai Bentov, Israel Barzilai, Yosef Burg, Moshe Carmel, Haim Gvati, Moshe Kol, Eliahu Sasson, Haim Moshe Shapira, Behor Shalom Shitrit, Ya'acov Shimshon Shapira, Zerah Warhaftig, and Haim Zadok.[6]

Eshkol had succeeded David Ben-Gurion as prime minister in 1963, and his style was widely perceived as more cautious than his predecessor's, giving an impression that Israel would be less willing to engage Arab states in hostilities.[7] The governing Mapai party was the central force in the Labor movement; by 1965 it had joined with the reconstituted Achdut Ha'Avoda-Poalei Zion to form the first Alignment, and Rafi — Ben-Gurion's breakaway party — contested the elections separately.[8]

During 1966, the government took a significant domestic measure: Eshkol decided to end the military government that had governed Israel's Arab citizens, with the stated aim of easing their conditions, and made the decision official with an announcement in December 1966.[9] Escalating Syrian-Israeli tensions and wider regional developments continued to gather through 1966 and into 1967, setting the stage for the crisis that would transform the government's composition and its historical standing.[7]

In 1968, a ministerial committee chaired by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan addressed the question of military-service exemptions for yeshiva students, maintaining the existing arrangement while setting a quota of 800 students, with no government initiative to enlist them; two Alignment Knesset members nonetheless submitted bills on the issue in January of that year.[10]

The regional crisis of May 1967 transformed the government entirely. Egyptian forces moved toward Israel's frontier, Egypt demanded the removal of the UN force from Sinai and from Sharm el-Sheikh and the Gaza Strip, and on May 23 Egypt announced the closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping and to international shipping carrying strategic material to Eilat — a step Eshkol characterized before the Knesset as a grave violation of international freedom and an act of aggression against Israel.[11][12] Egyptian troop strength in Sinai was estimated at about 80,000.[12] Jordan entered the Arab war coalition, and Israel mobilized the IDF; Foreign Minister Abba Eban was dispatched to seek aid from France, Britain, and the United States.[13]

Public anxiety was acute. Eshkol's live radio address on May 28, 1967, deepened the crisis of confidence in his leadership: he encountered a handwritten change to his prepared text mid-broadcast and whispered to an aide, "What does it say?" An engineer cut the sound for seven seconds; the original broadcast included the interruption, though the recording rebroadcast that night was edited.[14] The speech contributed to intense public and political pressure to broaden the government.[14] Calls grew for a national-unity government, and the National Religious Party called for an emergency government; Mapai initially opposed widening the cabinet but changed its position within days.[15]

The IDF General Staff pressed Eshkol to launch a preemptive strike against Egypt. According to one account, Eshkol held off the generals from May 15 through June 4 as diplomacy was pursued, and Israel attacked on June 5 after Eshkol concluded that diplomacy had failed.[16] IDF chief Yitzhak Rabin suffered a breakdown from exhaustion during the crisis, and coalition parties pressed Eshkol to appoint Moshe Dayan as defense minister.[13]

On June 4, 1967, Eshkol formed the National Unity Government, bringing Moshe Dayan in as minister of defense and Menachem Begin and Yosef Sapir in as ministers without portfolio.[6] It was the first time that Herut, Gahal, and Rafi had joined a government.[5] Dayan had approached Eshkol on May 25 asking to be drafted into the IDF and had visited IDF formations to inspect preparations before entering the government; the Foreign Ministry identified him as a Rafi Knesset member who replaced Eshkol as defense minister.[17][14] Eshkol had also considered Yigal Allon for the defense portfolio before settling on Dayan.[15] David Ben-Gurion, then associated with Rafi, declined to join.[18]

The expanded government comprised ten factions and raised coalition support to 111 Knesset members, compared with 75 on the day the original government had been established.[19] The addition of Dayan, Begin, and Sapir raised the cabinet to 21 ministers.[20] Begin and Sapir remained in the government through Eshkol's death and continued serving under Golda Meir until the end-of-1969 elections.[18]

The decision-making process before the Six-Day War was compressed into a matter of days after the national unity government's formation. On June 2, 1967, the General Staff pressed Eshkol to launch a war, and in a subsequent consultation Dayan proposed June 5 as the date.[21] On June 4, after a Defense Ministerial Committee meeting, Eshkol and other ministers agreed to proceed; the committee then met with the full cabinet, which decided by a majority of 18 "to take military action to free Israel from the suffocating aggression grip tightening around it."[21] The decision was followed by an order to begin the campaign on the morning of June 5 with an air attack on Egyptian military airfields.[21]

The government's instruction to the IDF, as one analysis characterizes it, was simply "to remove the seal choking the State of Israel" — language that did not specify which territories to occupy or for what purpose.[22] That same analysis argues that the subsequent occupation of Sinai up to the Suez Canal, Judea and Samaria, and the Golan Heights resulted in part from the IDF's expansionist approach operating within this open-ended mandate.[22]

Eshkol informed the Knesset that the government had changed only after the attack on Egypt had already begun; the change required parliamentary approval, which the Knesset subsequently granted with relatively little debate.[5] On June 12, 1967, Eshkol addressed the Knesset to report on the conclusion of the fighting. He described Israeli forces as then controlling the Sinai Peninsula to the Suez Canal, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, and announced that Jerusalem had been reunified.[11] Of the expanded cabinet's performance, he stated: "the expanded Government, including the Cabinet Committee on Security Affairs, has stood, and continues to stand, the test of national leadership."[11] The Knesset session on June 5 itself had taken place in a basement shelter, with Jordanian artillery shelling Jerusalem — including the Knesset building — during the address.[23]

The days immediately following the ceasefire brought the government face-to-face with questions about the territories it had captured and the terms on which it might relinquish them. A meeting of the national unity government on June 18–19, 1967 — one week after the ceasefire on all fronts — addressed Israel's position for debate at the United Nations, secret clarifications to the U.S. administration concerning previous agreements and armistice lines, possible annexation, Jerusalem, and the possibility of a binational state.[24] Police Minister Eliahu Sasson criticized some ministers for their limited understanding of Arab countries and governments.[24]

On June 19, 1967, the cabinet voted on competing proposals concerning peace with Egypt and Syria, then unanimously approved a draft proposing peace with those countries "on the basis of the international border and the security requirements of Israel."[25] The government secretly resolved that Israel would agree to return to international borders with Egypt and Syria in exchange for security arrangements and guarantees of freedom of navigation in the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal.[26] The decision did not include return to the international border with Jordan, and no offer was made to Amman; the Jordanian question was postponed.[25][26] The decision was communicated secretly to the United States, and Egypt and Syria did not respond positively.[25]

The June 19 deliberations also exposed deep disagreements within the broadly composed cabinet. Ministers disagreed over conditions for peace and whether Israel should relinquish territory at all; Menachem Begin proposed wording asserting Israeli sovereignty over "Western Eretz Israel" but withdrew the proposal when it became clear it lacked a government majority.[25] Whether the June 19 decision actually reached Cairo and Damascus cannot be definitively established from the available records.[16]

In parallel with these diplomatic steps, the government adopted a two-track approach: expressing willingness to negotiate while also planning Jewish settlements in territories captured in 1967.[7] Eshkol offered to negotiate "everything" for full peace, with proposed terms including free passage through the Suez Canal and Strait of Tiran, a solution to the refugee problem, and regional cooperation.[7] Israel accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242 in November 1967; disputes over interpretation of its withdrawal language followed.[7] The Arab states, for their part, rejected negotiations and adopted the Khartoum "three nos": no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations with Israel.[7]

Settlement planning focused on creating territorial contiguity and demographic change, providing strategic depth, and improving security on Israel's new borders.[27] The government announced plans for resettlement in Jerusalem's Old City, the Etzion Bloc, the northern Golan Heights, and areas near Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.[7]

The government did not comprehensively debate Defense Minister Moshe Dayan's administrative guidelines for the West Bank and Gaza or translate them into detailed decisions; the IDF took on the burden of governing the Palestinian population, with Dayan the main political authority involved in the territories' administration.[28] A separate analysis characterizes this approach as lacking defined strategic goals for the occupied territories.[28]

Eshkol and Dayan established professional government committees at the beginning of July 1967 to propose plans for developing and managing the local population in the territories. The committees considered matters including movement, employment, education, health, village rehabilitation, refugees, and family reunification.[27] The government also decided after Jerusalem's unification to grant East Jerusalem residents permanent residency while allowing them to retain Jordanian citizenship — an arrangement that did not apply to the rest of Judea and Samaria.[27]

On June 26, 1967, Labor Minister Yigal Allon submitted a document to Eshkol titled "The Future of the Territories and Ways to Handle the Refugees," proposing arrangements concerning the West Bank and Gaza and addressing political, security, employment, and demographic issues involving the Golan Heights and Sinai.[27] Eshkol did not put the Allon plan to a government vote because he feared it would provoke strong opposition; it was never adopted as official government policy, though major settlement elements associated with it were later implemented in practice.[27]

The 1967 local population of the West Bank and Gaza together was approximately one million, including about 600,000 people in the West Bank — a demographic reality that shaped the government's deliberations over settlement and future negotiating positions.[27] After the war, the Foreign Ministry account records that Eshkol worked to secure sophisticated American weapons, including advanced aircraft for the IDF, and initiated talks with Palestinian leaders in the administered areas in an effort to promote neighborly relations and peace.[29]

The Knesset tracked and debated these developments throughout the government's final two years: recorded Knesset sittings during the Sixth Knesset include June 21, 1967 debates on a peace plan and the Arab population in administered areas; a June 27 debate on Jerusalem's reunification; a March 4, 1968 discussion on municipal services in East Jerusalem; and an October 29, 1968 debate on the beginning of the War of Attrition.[30]

During the government's tenure, significant realignments reshaped the Israeli political map. Mapai, Ahdut HaAvoda, and Rafi merged in 1968 to form the Labor Party.[7] Before the 1969 elections, Labor and Mapam formed an electoral Alignment while retaining their organizational independence.[7] These mergers were consequential for the coalition's internal dynamics: Rafi, which had initially been an opposition party and from which Moshe Dayan had come to join the unity government, was now folded into Labor alongside Mapai, strengthening the governing coalition's ideological coherence even as the broader national unity framework remained in place.

Yisrael Galili was also promoted within the government structure, moving from minister without portfolio to minister of information, reflecting the evolving distribution of cabinet responsibilities as the postwar period deepened.[15] Menachem Begin's continued presence in the government — his first ever in a coalition — marked a historic shift in Israeli political culture, bringing the Herut movement, the dominant component of Gahal, into the business of governing for the first time.[5]

Levi Eshkol died in office on February 26, 1969, of a heart attack and remains the only Israeli prime minister to have died while serving.[2][25] Under Israeli law, his death brought about the government's formal resignation.[6] Yigal Allon, who held the post of deputy prime minister and minister for absorption of immigration, served as acting prime minister for approximately three weeks.[3][2] The Knesset held a memorial sitting for Eshkol on March 6, 1969.[30]

Golda Meir succeeded Eshkol as head of the Labor Party and then as prime minister; the existing coalition agreement was maintained following Eshkol's death.[5] On March 17, 1969, the Knesset approved the Fourteenth Government, with Meir as prime minister.[5][29] Begin and Sapir remained in the cabinet under Meir until the elections at the end of 1969.[18] The national-unity phase of the Thirteenth Government, created on the eve of the Six-Day War, therefore lasted within this government's term from June 4, 1967, to March 17, 1969.[3][6]

Several aspects of the Thirteenth Government's record remain subjects of historical debate. Sources differ on the precise formation date of the national unity government: one INSS account gives June 1, 1967, while the Washington Institute for Near East Policy describes it as formed on the day before the war began, and a Jewish Virtual Library entry gives June 4; the official Israeli government documentation does not pinpoint a single sub-date within the June 1967 expansion.[5][6]

The role of government direction versus military initiative in determining the geographic scope of the 1967 territorial gains is also contested. One analysis argues that the IDF's expansionist approach — operating under an open-ended government instruction — drove the occupation beyond what the cabinet had explicitly authorized; other accounts emphasize the cabinet vote and its formal decision to act.[22][21] These interpretations reflect ongoing scholarly disagreement about the relationship between political and military decision-making during the war.

The government's postwar territorial policy is similarly debated. Some analyses characterize it as lacking defined strategic goals, while others point to the secret June 19 peace proposals as evidence of concrete — if ultimately unsuccessful — diplomatic thinking.[28][26] The status of territories captured in 1967, settlement policy, and the interpretation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 remain politically and historically contested, and the accounts in the available sources reflect differing perspectives rather than a settled consensus.