Makes Shamir Look Like a Moderate : * New Israeli Government Is Not Built for Compromise

Israel’s new government represents the most dramatic lurch to the right in the country’s 42-year history. And that is not going to help the peace process.

Israel’s new government represents the most dramatic lurch to the right in the country’s 42-year history. And this is not going to help the peace process.

Its narrow base--it was approved by only 62 members of the 120-member Knesset--leaves Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir dependent on two small parties best known for wanting to annex the West Bank, and on a third that would expel all Arabs living there. Further support comes from Orthodox religious elements expected to demand tougher dietary and Sabbath closing laws.

In short, it is a government of rigidly fixed and obdurate views, of men who for the most part have little inclination to pursue the democratic political norms of compromise and conciliation.

What do Israelis think of such a coalition? An opinion poll published last week, before Shamir finally forged his new alliance, found only 14% of voters favoring establishment of a regime based on far-right and religious parties.

Nonetheless, that is the kind of government Israel now has. Israelis uncomfortable with annexationist and expulsionist views may find consolation in the prospect that internal disputes could soon send the coalition flying apart.

Shamir himself has been restrained in hailing the end of the 88 days of interim government that followed the Labor Alignment’s decision to pull out of its coalition with his Likud party. His own preference clearly was to revive the troubled but tolerable marriage with Labor that had produced six years of power sharing. That would have assured continued paralysis in a number of areas, key among them decisions about dealing politically with the Palestinians. But it would also have spared Shamir the need to placate the extremists to whom he was forced to turn for support. It says much about the political cast of the new government that Shamir, by comparison, emerges as one of its more moderate members.

In partial recognition of the trouble-making potential of his multiparty government, Shamir has set as its first priority the integration of the 250,000 Soviet Jewish immigrants expected this year. It’s a reasonable goal, first because Israel remains appallingly ill-prepared to house and employ the sudden wave of immigrants now flooding in, second because absorption is probably the one issue most Israelis can agree on for now.

The drawback is that the man Shamir has put in charge of housing is Ariel Sharon, the former defense minister and architect of Israel’s disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon. It’s no secret where Sharon would prefer to build accommodations for new citizens: on the West Bank. Such an effort could set up a renewed confrontation with the Bush Administration, which strongly opposes the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.

The shift to the far-right makes it all but inevitable that Israel will do even less than it has so far to pursue political talks with the Palestinians. David Levy, the new foreign minister, opposes Shamir’s own 1989 plan for elections in the occupied territories. In any event, the attempted May 30 attack on Israeli civilian targets by an element of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the PLO’s typically self-wounding refusal specifically to condemn such terrorism, could force an effective suspension of the U.S. intermediary role.

That won’t disturb Israel’s hard-line government. But there’s plenty about the new government that can be expected to disturb the Israeli people, and distress Israel’s friends.