Ultra-Orthodox Party Favors Peres : Israel: Agudat Israel backs the Labor leader as the next prime minister. It had supported the rightist Likud in recent years.

Shimon Peres, dovish leader of Israel’s Labor Party, moved closer to getting the chance to lead the next government Monday when a small, ultra-religious party recommended him as the country’s next prime minister.

The Agudat Israel Party, with five seats in Parliament, recommended Peres to Chaim Herzog, Israel’s president. Herzog, as required by Israeli law, is canvassing political leaders to see who they think has the best chance of putting together a working coalition.

According to Israeli analysts, Peres can count on parties holding at least 60 seats in the 120-seat Knesset to back him; that means Labor can do no worse for support than the Likud Party headed by caretaker Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

But as the biggest single party in the Knesset, Labor is likely to win Herzog’s appointment, Israeli analysts say. Labor controls five more seats than Likud because of recent defections from Shamir’s party.

Still, there is at least a day of consultations left and the system has proven to be full of surprises. Agudat’s choice in itself is unusual; it, like other religious parties, favored rightist Likud in recent years.

“We recommended that Mr. Peres be allowed to form the government,” Rabbi Menahem Porush of Agudat Israel said after meeting with Herzog.

Peres has pledged to lead Israel into peace talks if he takes the reins of government. Should he get Herzog’s nod, he will still face plenty of bargaining to piece together a coalition of parties on the left, which are his natural backers, and religious parties that care little for leftists, or even statecraft and foreign policy.

Likud supporters apparently have begun to sense trouble and are arguing that Likud and Shamir should form the next government because Likud’s support is truly Zionist and not dependent on religious parties that have been indifferent or even historically opposed to the secular Jewish state.

Agudat Israel opposes the foundation of Israel on the theological grounds that such a step is the business of the Messiah.

Another religious group, the Shas party, was instrumental in bringing down Shamir by withholding five votes from him during a no-confidence motion last week.

The turbulence over forming a new coalition bubbled away as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter toured Israel and criticized the government’s human rights record in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, home to 1.7 million Palestinians. Israel has been trying to put down the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the occupied lands for 28 months.

“I think the intifada is being perpetuated partially by the abuse of the Palestinians themselves,” said Carter, who is on a private visit. “There is hardly a family that lives in the West Bank and Gaza who hasn’t had one of their male members actually incarcerated by the military authorities since the intifada started.

“Here you have a democratic government that for almost 23 years has been responsible for the lives of these people. And they (the Israelis) are still demolishing homes, they are still putting them in prison without charges--they (the detainees) don’t have a chance to see their families, they don’t even have a chance to face their accusers and they stay in prison for as much as a year,” said Carter, who helped draft the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.

As part of his tour of the Middle East, Carter may also visit Tunisia to speak with Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization. However, that trip may be canceled because Arafat reportedly is planning a trip of his own.