Palestine Communist Party in
Haifa, 23 October 1948.
Seated (L-R): Meir Vilner,
Tawfik Toubi,
Shmuel Mikunis,
Emile Habibi, George Garabadian.
Standing: Ruth Lubitsch, Eliyahu Drukman, Abraham Feigenboim, Wolf Ehrlich, Alyosha Gozansky, Pnina Feinhaus,
Esther Vilenska, Mordechai Biletski. During the last years of the British mandate, Vilner became disenchanted with mainstream Zionist politicians, claiming that Jewish
anti-Arab racism was comparable to the
antisemitism he experienced in Vilnius. He joined the
Palestine Communist Party (PCP), which accepted both Arabs and Jews as members, and initially opposed plans to
partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. In March 1946, Vilner testified to the
Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, claiming that partition strengthen the dependency of both states on outside aid and widen the gulf between Arabs and Jews. However, he subsequently changed his mind and supported the 1947
United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine after the
Soviet Union's position on partition changed in the same year to one of support. On May 14, 1948, Vilner participated in the proclamation ceremony of the
State of Israel and co-signed the
Israeli Declaration of Independence on behalf of the PCP. Along with other PCP members, Vilner stressed the necessity of upholding the declaration's promises to implement
United Nations resolutions which called for a
two-state solution to the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict and uphold
civil and political rights for all Israeli citizens.
As a member of the Knesset portrait, 1951 In 1949, he was
elected to the
Knesset as a member of Maki. He resigned from the Knesset in December 1959, six weeks after the
1959 elections, but was re-elected in 1961. However, he resigned again two months after the
1961 elections. As the Jewish leader of the
Communist Party of Israel (CPI), 95% of whose members were Arabs, he rejected
Zionism, publicized the
Israeli nuclear weapons program in 1963, and opposed the imposition of
martial rule on Israeli Arabs (imposed in 1949, it was lifted in 1966). In 1965 Vilner and several other Maki members broke away from the party to form the new party
Rakah following disagreements about the
Soviet Union's increasingly anti-Israel stance (Vilner was on the USSR's side), and was elected to the Knesset on the new party's list in the
1965 elections. On 5 June 1967, Vilner was the sole Jewish deputy (joined only by fellow Communist Party of Israel deputy
Tawfik Toubi) to speak out in the Knesset against the
Six-Day War. Calling that day the darkest in Israel's history, Vilner demanded an immediate halt to the Israeli invasion of Arab-occupied lands. Vilner stressed that there was no other way to solve the conflict between Israel and its neighbors but mutual recognition of the national rights of Israelis and Arabs, including the
right of the Palestinians to self-determination and independent statehood. On 15 October, he was badly wounded in a stabbing by a member of the right-wing party
Gahal. 1976 convention Rakah became part of
Hadash before the
1977 elections, and Vilner remained an MK until 1990 when he resigned as part of a seat rotation agreement, making him the fifth longest serving MK.
Soviet ties Vilner's Soviet loyalist line was highly appreciated by the USSR; in 1978 he was awarded the
Order of Friendship of Peoples. He did not accept
perestroika and regarded the
fall of communism in the USSR as a
coup. ==Personal life and death==