Shamir Coalition Loses Majority : Israel: Two right-wing parties withdraw their support to protest Mideast talks. The prime minister presses for midyear elections and U.S. foreign-aid support.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s governing coalition formally lost its majority Sunday, and Israel’s leader promptly began pressing for midyear elections and for foreign-aid support from the Bush Administration that would let him ease economic problems that could bedevil his campaign.

As expected during Sunday’s regular Cabinet meeting, two far-right parties withdrew their support--five parliamentary seats in all--from Shamir to protest the Middle East peace talks. While the peace process has produced no agreements on issues of substance so far, its backers and critics both had agreed that some accords might be reached in the future.

There is wide speculation that the elections will be held in June, and Shamir is scheduled to consult today with the opposition Labor Party, which, after Shamir’s own Likud Party, is Israel’s largest vote-getter.

Shamir himself met Sunday with ministers from Likud, imploring them to prepare for the elections, originally not planned before November, the scheduled end of Shamir’s four-year term.

The breakdown in the governing coalition coincides with intense debate over the Middle East peace talks, of which a third round concluded in Washington last week.

Rightists here, including important elements of Shamir’s Likud Party, fretted that the Palestinians, as a result of the talks, would eventually gain control over parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This attitude was reflected Sunday in remarks by Rehavam Zeevi, who pulled his two-seat Moledet Party out of the governing coalition. “We will be satisfied with the fall of this government as soon as possible,” said Zeevi, whose party favors removal of all 1.7 million Palestinian residents from the occupied territories.

There is also concern on the right that the Bush Administration will pressure Israel into conceding land in return for peace with its Arab neighbors. Yuval Neeman, head of the three-seat Tehiya Party, hopes that in time, Bush will lose power in Washington and be replaced with a more amenable administration.

“Maybe a friendlier establishment will emerge in the United States,” he said. “ . . . We’ve never had in the United States an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel regime like this one.”

In contrast, liberal parties expressed some willingness to support Shamir as long as the peace talks move forward.

This confused political panorama made it uncertain how a date for new elections will be set. If Labor refuses to play ball with Shamir in setting a date, he could be removed in a vote of no-confidence; such a vote is scheduled to be held next week. If it carries, that would probably mean an election date in May.

Alternatively, Shamir could resign, but that would risk the slim possibility that the opposition Labor Party could take power.

The talks have also produced a violent reaction among Palestinian radicals who have claimed responsibility for a series of fatal shootings of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

On Sunday, an American professor at Birzeit University, the largest Palestinian college, was shot to death on the street, although police were unsure of the motive and Palestinians insisted that the American, archeologist Albert Ernst Glock, 67, of Gifford, Ida., was pro-Palestinian and could not have been a target of extremist violence.

The army closed Birzeit four years ago on grounds that the campus was breeding anti-Israeli violence, but classes are held clandestinely off-campus. There have been complaints by Muslim fundamentalists about foreign teachers bringing alien ideas--and diseases--to campus.

Glock was shot twice at close range outside his car on the way to Ramallah as he was delivering a package to a friend, school officials said.

Shamir made it clear in an interview last week that he will run in the next elections. He has already defeated a parliamentary effort to change voting rules to permit the direct election of the prime minister, which would have forced him to run head-to-head with a single candidate from the Labor Party. As it stands, the customary method prevails, in which the head of the party that wins the most parliamentary seats is called upon to form and lead the government.

Pollsters predict that no single party stands to win an outright majority in the balloting, something that in turn will result in the kind of coalition-building that has occurred after the past several Israeli elections. Of the possible future coalitions, a right wing-religious alliance much like Shamir’s present government is the most likely outcome, observers say.

The Labor Party is mired in its own power struggle between perpetual leadership candidates Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, both former prime ministers.

Peres, considered a dovish candidate, took the unexpected step of suggesting that peace talks be suspended as Israel enters its electoral season. He asserted that Shamir would be unable to make any substantial decisions on peace matters while campaigning for the survival in government of Likud. “I don’t believe you can conduct a peace process with elections in the air,” Peres argued.

Peres’ suggestion would also have the unstated effect of robbing Shamir of the chance to claim he is fully participating in the peace talks, even in the heat of campaigning.

The prospect of early elections puts the Bush Administration in the thick of the coming battle. The Administration is considering Shamir’s request that Washington underwrite $2 billion in loans his government wants to use for immigrant job creation.

Outright rejection of the loan guarantees would deprive Shamir of the chance to campaign on a record of constructive relations with Washington and assured economic growth in the future. If Washington grants the guarantees, Israel’s economic uncertainties would be reduced.

Israel Radio reported Shamir’s request to Washington for the guarantees contains a prediction of higher unemployment rates for Israel, based on the anticipated influx of up to 1 million Soviet Jews during the next few years.

The Bush Administration has been irritated by Shamir’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, a program that has required expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when Israel has pleaded for U.S. aid to absorb the new immigrants.

The Administration believes that Jerusalem’s accelerated settlement program undermines chances that the Palestinians and the rest of Israel’s Arab enemies will come to terms with this country in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from at least some of the occupied land.

The Palestinians have threatened to pull out of the U.S.-brokered peace talks if the loan guarantees are approved.

In Washington, an official at the Israeli Embassy sent a memorandum to Israeli consulates in the United States urging a Jewish-American campaign to prod Bush for the loan guarantees, noting that Bush’s own political problems make him vulnerable to pressure.

The official, Yoram Ettinger, in charge of the embassy’s relations with Congress, denied that he has called for a conflict with the Administration.

In any event, the document, which was disclosed by opposition politicians and reported on government-controlled radio, may anger Bush, who last fall expressed unhappiness that Israel’s lobby in Washington had mobilized a strong Jewish-American effort to win approval of the guarantees at that time.