Before this I have to say
I knew Shulamit Aloni from 'HaOlam HaZeh'.
I had interviewed her more than once and we had quite a good relationship.
And she irked Golda [Meir],
Golda hated her perhaps even more than she had hated me.
It is easier to hate someone in your own party than someone in another party.
So she did a very, very nasty thing:
the day before submitting the lists, something like that or two days before
she removed [Shulamit] from a viable position on the list,
and thought that she would finish her by doing that.
What could she do in the day or two that remained?
But there was one thing Golda didn't take into account: there was a group of feminists,
led by a Jewish-American woman named Marcia Freedman
and a feminist from Ramat Hasharon I believe,
named Resnick, who wanted to run for Knesset
despite the fact that they had no chance of getting in, but they had collected the necessary signatures.
And they had all the signatures required
with the submission books of a list
and they said, 'Shula, come to us. You'll be our leader'.
Then, on the last date for submitting the lists,
Amnon Zichroni and I went there.
We didn't need any signatures for anything.
A list that had already been in the outgoing Knesset does not need signatures.
We came in the afternoon and decided: 'Let's submit it at the last minute.
At the last moment journalists and television crews will come; that's when we'll submit'.
So with our lists in hand we were walking around the Knesset building
and we saw Shulamit Aloni in one of the rooms.
On this wide table of the Knesset Committee
was a huge pile of notes of support
and a second stack of candidates, not arranged in any kind of order,
and she was alone – although someone else might have been there, I forget who.
So we felt sorry for her and told her, 'Come on, let us help you'.
And we helped her to arrange the list, placing the signatures,
copying the signatures into these books. I helped her arrange the order of the candidates,
totally random, by the way.
Later, she had trouble with this one and with that one – a lot of trouble.
But we compiled the list in a completely random manner.
We knew she was in first place, but who was second? Also we didn't know who these people were, in general.
We helped her and she was able to submit the list
before they closed the gates, and then we filed our own list.
That was when disaster struck.
Shulamit passed the threshold in a big way, I think three candidates were elected,
but we didn't pass the threshold.
For me personally it was a very harsh blow.
I thought I didn't deserve it. We were fine, we had fulfilled all our promises,
I had gone to all of the sessions, I made countless speeches,
our supporters had all agreed with our actions at all times,
at gatherings and meetings of the faction we had heard only praise
and suddenly...
the team members didn't feel this blow,
but for me it was really very hard.
And it took me a few weeks until I was again able to get used to being just the editor of 'HaOlam HaZeh'.
I had three days a week free.
My work was organized.
That's it − we went back to the previous routine.