With Election Over, Real Scramble Begins to Form a Coalition : Israelis Vote--and Then the Politicking Starts

Political bargaining designed to construct a coalition government in Israel has begun in earnest, with feints and jabs that indicate that no party can take its potential partners for granted.

Surprises and rancor are commonplace. Two religious parties that were considered certain to join a right-wing coalition headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud Party balked Monday and said they could not make up their minds right away.

The center-left Labor Party, until now given little chance to form a government, tried to stay afloat, even at the cost of discarding some of its longest-held principles.

Talks between parties are being scheduled and postponed with regularity. Late-night meetings are the rule.

Tension Abounds

Tension grew both between parties and within them. On Sunday, in the first post-election Cabinet meeting of the carryover government, a shouting match broke out between Industry Minister Ariel Sharon of Likud and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Labor. Rabin, meanwhile, started feuding with his own party leader, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

In most democratic countries, such passion might have been reserved for the period before the vote. But here, electoral politics are run something like the National Hockey League season; the campaign and popular vote merely whittle down a large field of parties to a smaller collection that participates in post-election play, when the sticks really begin to fly.

In last Tuesday’s vote, Likud led by winning 40 seats of the 120 seats at stake in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. Labor came in second with 39. Since then, each has frantically sought allies to forge a majority and take power. There are 13 other parties that won seats, and all but two pro-Arab parties are considered candidates for a coalition.

Under the country’s complex system of proportional representation, even a party that won only 1% of the vote can try for a place in government.

This is the rule, not the exception; no party in the Israel’s 40-year history has won a clear majority in the Knesset, which would give it the right to form a government on its own. All have had to bargain with sliver parties.

A cartoon in The Nation, an English-language newspaper, offered a popular view of the proceedings:

Two Israelis are shown watching the U.S. elections on television and marveling at the simplicity of the American system, because either George Bush or Michael S. Dukakis will win.

“They have a vote, and that’s the end of it,” notes one.

“By us,” the other responds, “the voting is only beginning.”

Since election day, the parties, big vote-getters and small, have been talking privately in efforts to construct a working alliance. Some of the combinations are having trouble getting off the ground.

Likud, with its 40 seats and a supposed affinity with rightist religious parties, is given the best chance to form a government. And, indeed, Likud is feverishly courting the religious bloc of four parties that won 18 seats, along with other rightist parties that control seven.

Shas Balks at Likud Alliance

But on Tuesday, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish party known as Sephardic Torah Guardians, or Shas, and representing voters of mainly North African ancestry, balked and refused to declare itself for Likud as expected. Shas’ leaders, who won six seats, said they need a few days to think.

Likud is also having trouble reconciling demands of its potential religious allies with at least one of three likely partners from the extreme right.

Retired Gen. Rafael Eitan, head of the two-seat Tzomet Party, is resisting joining a government that includes religious parties because he opposes military draft deferments that are granted to divinity students who, in fact often study for a lifetime.

Labor Party followers have been mildly excited by the sudden, if ambiguous, interest in them shown by Shas and by a smaller ultra-Orthodox party, Flag of the Torah, which won two seats.

Strange Bedfellows

A Labor partnership with ultra-Orthodox parties would be a novelty. Labor, as heir to the secular Zionist tradition of Israel’s founders, is considered beyond the pale by many ultra-Orthodox leaders.

But with the party holding an outside chance of taking power, Labor’s traditions appeared to be in a state of flux. One ranking party member said Labor would not oppose, as a group, the controversial “who is a Jew” law that would put authority for all Jewish conversions in the hands of Orthodox rabbis--even though Labor’s platform specifically opposed such measures.

“Each Parliament member will vote his conscience,” said Shimon Shitrit, a Labor member of the Knesset.

Winning the religious parties to its side might begin Labor’s problems, not end them. To complete a coalition, Labor would need to persuade leftist and even more secular parties to join in. These parties, notably the Citizens’ Rights Movement, with five seats, and Mapam, with three, oppose the religious party’s attempts to impose Judaic observances on public life.

The tangled talks have prompted Israel’s President Chaim Herzog to urge Labor and Likud to renew participation in a coalition government with the sole aim of reforming the electoral system. By law, Herzog, whose usual duties are confined to such things as greeting visitors from abroad, is in charge of designating the party considered best able to form a government.

So far, Shamir and Peres have rejected the idea of joining forces. The pair were uneasy partners in a so-called national unity government after inconclusive elections in 1984. Since then, neither has made an effort to reform the system, even though together they controlled an overwhelming majority in the Knesset.

Ideas for reform include increasing the number of votes needed to win a Knesset seat or perhaps holding runoff elections in case no party wins a majority. Both would make it harder for minor parties to hold the balance of power, as they do now.

If the search for viable combinations were not muddled enough, both Labor and Likud are showing signs of internal strains.

Sharon Speaks Up Again

Likud member Sharon, who as defense minister was the architect of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, is openly bidding for the post of defense minister in a Likud government. Word from the talkative Sharon had been expected; during the election campaign, Likud Party leaders had muzzled him on the campaign trail because they feared that his hard-line views would scare away voters.

On Sunday, Sharon suggested that Israel annex portions of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, despite Likud’s public opposition to such a move. He also said he would close all newspapers in the occupied lands and severely limit the movements of Arabs in order to strangle an 11-month-old uprising there.

Over at Labor, Defense Minister Rabin attacked his own party boss, Peres, for saying that Labor lost the election because--two days before the vote--Arabs threw a gasoline bomb at a public bus and killed an Israeli mother and her three children.