Analysis : Israeli Parties Vie to Forge Coalition : New Era Seen in Wake of Strong Religious Vote

The surprising strength of Israel’s religious parties in Tuesday’s national elections, and the likelihood that these parties will join a rightist, Likud-led government, promise to reshape the political map of the country.

The changes will have far-reaching implications not only for Israel but also for its Arab neighbors, for its relations with the United States and for American Jews. They will bring on a domestic upheaval no less dramatic than the one that followed the elections of 1977, which brought Menachem Begin to power and ended a Labor Party monopoly that began with the founding of Israel.

The secular majority in Israel fears that the stunning showing by the religious parties will turn the country into what Shevah Weiss, a veteran Labor Party lawmaker, described as “some combination of democracy and theocracy.”

Ari Rath, editor of the English-language Jerusalem Post, said the election represents a shift “a bit to the Dark Ages.”

Still-unofficial results indicate that the religious parties will have 18 seats in the next Knesset, 6 more than at present. And 13 of those seats will go to parties representing the most orthodox religious elements--parties that will undoubtedly use their new political leverage to claim a much larger share of the national budget for their schools and to force places of entertainment to close on the Sabbath.

“This is going to change the public and private life of every Israeli,” said Ehud Sprinzak, a political scientist at Hebrew University and an expert on right-wing and religious trends in Israel.

The likely Likud-religious alliance appeared to sound the death knell for a plan, supported by Washington, for an international peace conference on the Middle East. The plan calls for Israel to withdraw from at least part of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories it has occupied since the 1967 Middle East War.

Diplomatic sources here said the next Administration in Washington will have to revise its approach to the peace process in the face of seemingly unalterable opposition to an international conference by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud leader.

Shamir said in a recent interview that if he stays on as prime minister, he will soon announce a peace initiative.

Analysts speculated that even a rightist government must at least pay lip service to a negotiated settlement, or face strong disapproval from the United States and the European Communities--or even the Soviet Union, with which Israel desires closer ties.

Presumably, however, Shamir’s approach will be to seek direct negotiations with Jordan and a hand-picked Palestinian contingent--something the Arabs are not likely to accept soon.

Meanwhile, the career of Israel’s champion of the international peace conference, Labor leader and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, is clearly on the decline.

‘Poor Position’

“Shimon Peres is in a very poor position in his own party,” commented Avraham Diskin, a Hebrew University political scientist. “I do believe he is not going to lead the Labor Party in the next elections.”

If Peres is forced out of the party leadership, it will mark the final passing of the proteges of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father.

“It’s very sad,” the Jerusalem Post’s Rath said.

But he noted that Peres had tempted the fates when he made himself, rather than his party, the focal point of the election campaign.

The election has sent tremors of concern through the American Jewish community and those in other countries. For the religious parties are considered certain to demand approval of the so-called who-is-a-Jew amendment.

Controversial Amendment

This controversial measure would deny automatic citizenship to people converted to Judaism by Reform or Conservative rabbis. It is bitterly opposed by American Jewish leaders, many of whom belong to the Reform or Conservative movements, as an attempt by Israel’s Orthodox establishment to make them second-class Jews.

David Clayman, the Conservative rabbi who directs the American Jewish Congress office in Jerusalem, quipped, “I’m packing and praying.”

The question of who is a Jew falls under the Interior Ministry, and the interior minister’s portfolio customarily goes to one of the religious parties in coalition governments.

Even in the unlikely event that Labor and Likud decide to join forces in another coalition government in order to avoid being held hostage by the religious parties, there will still be significant changes. Presumably one of the top priorities of such a government would be electoral reform aimed at limiting the leverage of small parties and edging the country closer to a two-party system.

Sought Leadership

Some analysts contend that as much as anything else, the strong showing by the religious parties indicates that the Israeli public failed to find the leadership it wants in either of the major parties.

Labor and Likud together could win only 77 seats in the Knesset this time, 8 fewer than in the 1984 elections and 18 fewer than in 1981, when they controlled 95 seats.

“This is a major, major surprise,” Hebrew University’s Sprinzak said. “The only explanation that I can come up with is that people were just upset by the two big parties and they turned to God. . . .

“In my judgment, it’s an act of desperation. It’s a call for help: ‘We do not get what we want from the lay politicians; perhaps the rabbis can help.’ ”

Clayman said he sees the results not so much as evidence that the Israeli public is turning away from the secular parties but as “the religious camp now coming into their own.”

‘We Have Power’

After years of preferring to exert power from the background, he said, the ultra-Orthodox parties “are now saying: ‘We’re not in the minority. We have power. We have made it. We can be in that Knesset. We can be ministers. We can run things on our own.’ And they’re doing it.”

The religious parties campaigned with unprecedented zeal, featuring prominent rabbis in their television advertisements. They talked not so much about security and peace, the issues that dominated the campaigns of the major parties, but about a return to religion, family traditions, old values.

Competition among the religious parties awakened the entire ultra-Orthodox community, which in the past has voted in numbers below the national average. Many Israelis had thought that all the infighting would weaken the religious camp, but in fact it strengthened it.

“All this infighting just turned out the vote tremendously,” Clayman said.

Less orthodox voters, who in the past had put tradition aside and voted for secular parties, gave the religious parties an important boost this time. Opinion studies show that between one-fourth and one-third of Israelis classify themselves as observant, suggesting that the religious parties have not yet realized their full electoral potential.

The only religious party that failed to live up to expectations was Meimad, which broke away from the National Religious Party to campaign on a moderate program favoring better religious-secular relations and withdrawal from the occupied territories in return for peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Meimad apparently failed to gain the 1% of the total vote required for representation in the Knesset.