Israeli Regime Falls on Vote of No Confidence

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government fell Thursday night on a tense parliamentary vote of no confidence as the rightist Likud Party leader doggedly refused to accept an American formula to start Israel’s first peace talks with the Palestinians.

The vote was 60 against Shamir’s government, 55 in favor of it and five key abstentions.

Shamir’s defeat marked the first time in Israel’s 41 years of independence a government had lost a no-confidence vote in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. Under Israel law, Shamir will continue as head of a transitional government while President Chaim Herzog begins what promises to be a long process of establishing a new regime.

The crisis began in late February when the Labor Party, then the Likud’s coalition partner, demanded that Shamir accept a plan for peace talks put forward by U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

Shamir refused Labor’s demand, and the crisis came to a head on Tuesday when Shamir fired Peres. The 10 other Labor ministers promptly resigned from the Cabinet, and Labor submitted the motion of no confidence in the rump government left to Shamir.

On Thursday night, after nearly seven hours of debate on the motion, the outcome clearly pivoted on the votes of the six-man Shas party, an ultra-Orthodox group that circulated a compromise proposal requiring Shamir to accept the Baker proposal. The prime minister demanded a two-hour recess and went to the home of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual guide of the Shas deputies. Soon after, he was joined there by Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the top Labor Party leaders.

Asked point-blank to approve the Baker plan and let Labor back into government in return for withdrawal of the no-confidence motion, Shamir refused, asking instead for more time for consultations. Peres and his party, flatly opposed to further delays, pressed for the critical vote.

As Shamir returned to his seat in the Knesset, the voice vote began; the prime minister smiled grimly as five of the six Shas seats remained empty, signaling automatic abstentions. A 60-60 tie would have meant victory for Shamir.

“We will continue in our fight,” Shamir told reporters immediately after the defeat. “Life goes on even after no-confidence votes.”

The fall of his government ended a day in which Peres and other Labor stalwarts again and again lashed the prime minister verbally for stalling. Peres, opening his remarks, declared: “We can have unity for the sake of peace, not unity for paralysis or evasions, not unity for murdering the peace process.”

In his own speech, Shamir gravely advised, “We are not afraid of peace or the peace process. We fear irresponsible concessions.

Throughout the crisis, Shamir has attacked Baker’s proposal that a Palestinian panel for preliminary talks in Cairo include a few deportees from the occupied territories as well as Palestinians residing in East Jerusalem. The former, he argued, would be tainted by influence from the Palestine Liberation Organization and the latter would raise questions about Israeli sovereignty over the eastern sector of Jerusalem, annexed after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Thursday’s debate began about 11 a.m. when Peres introduced the Labor motion of no confidence, almost precisely two days after he had been sacked by Shamir.

Shamir, the deputy prime minister and finance minister in the now-shattered coalition, rose from the front bench of the Labor deputies, an unaccustomed location for a man who has sat for many years at the table reserved for government ministers. At his request, he was introduced by Speaker Dov Shilansky simply as Knesset member Shimon Peres.

Rarely looking at his notes, Peres launched into a strident, sometimes angry attack on Shamir.

“We’ve come to express no confidence in a man,” he declared, looking at the impassive prime minister who sat scribbling on a tablet at the government table.

Several times, shouts from the Likud benches interrupted Peres, who paused impatiently as Shilansky gaveled for quiet in the modernistic stone-walled Knesset chamber. The hall was packed for the showdown between the two party leaders whose political futures were on the line.

Bearded deputies from the religious parties shuttled between the Labor and Likud benches, apparently discussing the last-minute compromise proposals designed to salvage the unity government.

“I propose voting no confidence in the man who ended two processes, peace and national unity,” Peres declaimed.

“Who will believe you ever again in this country?” he continued, accusing Shamir of breaking up the coalition and failing to deliver on promises to the religious parties, who held the swing votes on the no-confidence motion. “You have broken every promise.

“Shamir has one problem, fear,” Peres declared “Fear to make peace with Egypt, fear to make peace with Jordan, fear to reach a dialogue with the Palestinians.”

And, he asserted in a foreign policy revelation, Syria has notified Jerusalem that it wants to discuss negotiating demilitarization in the Golan Heights, the territory dividing Israel from its bitterest Arab enemy.

In the test of strength that came after weeks of a mounting crisis in the brittle coalition, the 66-year-old longtime leader of the left-center Labor Party was unrelenting in his 40-minute personal attack on Shamir, six years his senior.

The prime minister, who took the podium after leftist party leaders aligned with Labor had their say, read from a prepared text, rarely raising his eyes or his gravelly voice until late in his speech. Heckling from the Labor deputies halted him again and again until, exasperated, he growled over the tumult: “If you keep screaming, I’m staying here until tomorrow.”

Shamir traced the course of the peace plan based on Palestinian elections that he introduced 10 months ago, insisting that it had been damaged by lack of cooperation from Labor and what he characterized as inopportune comments by American officials.

Over the past months and weeks, he has accused Labor of being soft on PLO influence on the proposed peace talks, demanding guarantees that Palestinian representatives be free from direct or indirect contacts with the PLO.

He accused his former coalition partners of “constant back-stabbing”--and Peres personally of trying to dominate the peace process.

“Peres never accepted the fact that he was not prime minister,” Shamir charged, referring to the partnership that collapsed Tuesday. Peres headed an earlier Likud-Labor coalition from 1984 to 1986, trading stints at the top with Shamir.

“We must determine our fate,” Shamir demanded. “What we do here will affect the fate of the Jewish people throughout the world. The enemies are still at the gate. They are far from achieving their goals. The land is still being built and the way is still long to the settlement of all parts of her.”

According to Israeli political analysts, the compromise put forward by Shas was the deciding factor. Deputy Prime Minister David Levy, a Likud member, pointed out that his party had already rejected the Baker plan in Cabinet consultations before the coalition collapsed.

Rabbi Yosef, the Shas leader, had emerged in recent months as a convert to a peaceful solution of Israel’s long conflict with the Palestinians. He had argued that protection of human life took precedence over the disputed West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Yosef has a strong following among Israelis of North African and Near Eastern descent, an important voting bloc for Likud.

Under Israeli law, President Herzog will consult with party leaders and decide who has the best chance to form a new government. The inside track would seem to go to Peres--Likud suffered another blow Thursday when five of its members formed a separate faction, reducing the official Likud count in Parliament from 40 to 35, four less than Labor.

Herzog’s choice would have up to six weeks to build a working majority. If the first choice fails, the president can try someone else. If no one can paste together a coalition, new elections would be called.