By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
The Communist Party will likely decide Monday night to remain united with the Hadash political movement it founded, a party source told The Jerusalem Post.
The central committee party members were still in discussion in Haifa at press time. From inside the meeting, Hadash council chairman and Communist Party central committee member MK Muhammad Barakei told The Jerusalem Post by phone that "everything would be fine." He said he could not add more.
The meeting of the Communist party central committee took place following the commotion that broke out Saturday evening when MK Issam Mahoul, the secretary general of the Communist Party, was voted out of his second place spot in the Hadash movement primaries.
Some of the Communist Party members, such as Mahoul, are said to have wanted to separate from Hadash.
"The central committee will support the list [of candidates chosen] and not go in the direction of Binyamin Gonen, Tamar Gozansky and Issam Mahoul, which is division," said the source.
In the eyes of Mahoul, his loss of the second seat to Hanna Sweid, a member of Hadash but not the Communist Party, was a stab in the back to the party.
"This is a conspiracy against us," Mahoul told the Post.
But others disagree. A Communist Party member told the Post that Sweid was chosen because of who he was and not because voters wanted to remove the core Communist Party members from Hadash's council leadership.
"Eighty percent of Hadash's council are Communist Party members," said the source. "This shows that there was no attempt to divide from the party, because most of them were Communist Party members. It was the party members who did not choose the secretary-general."
The Communist Party founded Hadash, which is based on the party's political and social ideology, in order to expand its voter base among Jews and Arabs. Today many of Hadash's members are not members of the Communist Party.
Dov Hanin, a Jew who sits on the central committee of the Communist Party, won the third seat in Hadash's council, which he held in the last primaries. He did not, however, sit in the Knesset because Hadash united with Ahmed Tibi's Ta'al Party in the last elections and gave Tibi its third seat.
Hadash is likely to get at least that amount in the upcoming elections. In the coming days, Hadash will decide if it will once again make a joint electoral list with Tibi and give him the third seat.