Already for several years the Communist Party of Israel is in the grip of crisis, due to the combination of various objective and subjective causes. Among these could be counted the difficulties through which the international Communist movement passed. Following the collapse of the Socialist regimes in Europe, many Communist parties suffered crises and exhibited an increase of opportunist tendencies. The CPI was also adversely affected by the spread of negative phenomena in the general conduct of politics in Israel (and elsewhere), such as a growing tendency to place personal material interests above the principles and ideology for whose sake a particular party or movement was creat. The obtaining of a parliamentary seat (and other similar positions) with its concomitant personal gains, becomes a central goal, for whose sake the making of unprincipled alliances and coalitions are justified. (The long-standing custom of CPI Knesset members' salary being passed on to the party has been discontinued in the past years).

The main source of the crisis in the CPI is the unrelenting drive by a group of leaders to liquidate the party's Communist essence, and leave it empty of real content. But the crisis is not limited to such issues - it is also accompanied by severe organizational problems.

It is the present CPI leadership which is responsible for creating and exacerbating these problems - by its efforts to expel from the party those members who stood firmly against its liquiditionist tendencies, as well as those other members who held any kind of views critical of leadership's conduct.

This was conspicuously manifested in the characteristic policy, undertaken in the wake of the "Twenty-Third Congress". Any elected local leadership of a party branch or district, which was not to the taste of the national leaders, was dispersed by decree - even if elected by an overwhelming majority - and in their place were imposed branch or district committees supported only by a small minority of the membership in the given locality. (Our worst defeats in the latest parliamentary elections were in some of these places.)

Also, after the "Twenty-Third Congress", all opponents of the liquidationst line who had been party workers were one by one fired from their party jobs, under the guise of "reducing manpower due to the financial difficulties"; but somehow, only the holders of a particular kind of views were found to be redundant. Moreover, these sackings were carried out in a brutal and inhuman manner, rare not only in other political parties but even in the practice of private employers.

We note that the latest CPI Congress, the Twenty-Third, was illegal in all stages of its preparation and conduct, carried out in systematic and comprehensive violation of the party statutes. But it should also be noted that the same party leaders who hold this congress to have been valid and proper, and who again and again base themselves in public upon its resolutions, do not scruple to repeatedly violate those same resolutions, whenever the ideological or organizational content does not fit their convenience.

The same leaders who took complete control of the party organs following the "Twenty-Third Congress" are paying lip-service to the Communist ideal, but in practice take quite different positions; instead of presenting the Socialist alternative, they all too often content themselves with speaking in general terms of "peace, equality and social justice" only.

One of the most severe steps in this direction was the closing down, during the preparations for the "Twenty-Third Congress", of the CPI Hebrew ideological review "Arachim" and its Arab equivalent "A-Darb" - the only publications in Israel which had been conducting comprehensive and consistent education in Communist ideology as well as providing a wide amount of information on developments in the international communist movements, on the history of the CPI, on its present struggles and on developments in the country and the region. Now, the party's members and supporters no longer get information about the true situation in the Communist Movement and on the ideological positions of the overwhelming majority of Communist parties throughout the world.

It is no accident that in the leaflet published by the CPI Central Committee for May Day 1999, the word "Socialism" is not to be found. The abandonment of principled Socialist and Internationalist slogans is a continuing tendency.

As was noted earlier, after the 1999 parliamentary elections there was a further ideological and organizational deterioration; the policy of those who control the party leadership left the forces which are still faithful to the Communist idea no alternative but to work for the creation of a new party - a party which will continue struggling for the Communist ideals, in accordance with new developments in the country and the world.

In our country this also means a consistent ideological struggle against the Zionist ideology (and, of course, against its practice), which requires reference to new publications and new expressions of opinion on related matters. Such publication have become numerous in recent years, creating new opportunities for opponents of Zionism, such as the exposure of hitherto darks spots in the history of the Zionist movement and the state of Israel. The ideological debate does not preclude cooperation in specific struggles (struggle against settlements, against the occupation, against racism etc.); ideological debate could be carried out simultaneously with such cooperation.