Barak’s Crisis Points Up Fragility, Complexity of Israeli Government

Slipping through his gravest political crisis in nearly a year in office, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak salvaged his coalition government Thursday. But at what price?

He emerges diminished, having been backed into a corner by an unruly, corruption-plagued religious party that showed the lengths to which it can manipulate the established powers.

What he gains, at least in the short term, is the ability to pursue his agenda for settling Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as a deadline looms less than three months away. Barak’s aides contend that he made the only deal he could, one that ultimately will be less divisive than the alternatives.

The coalition crisis that has absorbed the premier’s energies for the last few weeks dramatized the fragility and complexities of the system that gives Barak his governing authority. It is a hybrid system, part parliamentary, part presidential, that forces even a prime minister elected by a landslide into a mean game of cutting deals and promising perks to avoid being run out of office by legislators. Cutting such deals makes the prime minister vulnerable to the next effort to apply political pressure and win concessions.

The government was saved, this time, when the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, Barak’s largest coalition partner, withdrew its threat to resign. If Shas had bolted, it would have deprived Barak of a parliamentary majority, frozen the peace process and inflamed religious and ethnic tensions among Israeli Jews.

Shas, which represents mostly working-class Sephardic, or Middle Eastern, Jews, agreed to stay when Meretz, the main leftist and staunchly secular party in the coalition, opted to quit.

Meretz had controlled the Education Ministry in the person of Yossi Sarid, who attempted to impose restrictions on Shas’ bankrupt religious school system.

With Meretz, and Sarid, gone, Shas became confident that the millions of dollars it is demanding for its schools will soon flow. Shas’ four government ministers, who tendered their resignations Tuesday, withdrew them Thursday, 40 minutes before they would have gone into effect.

Shas also received a pledge from Barak to legalize the party’s often-inflammatory pirate radio stations, according to a senior government official familiar with the agreement.

Barak’s aides argued Thursday that making a deal to keep Shas in the government averted a wider crisis that would divide the nation. Meretz, after all, will support any peace deals on principle, whether or not its politicians sit in the Cabinet.

In return, Barak won some concessions from the religious party. Shas is prepared to relinquish to Barak’s direct supervision the Israeli Land Authority, an agency that oversees how land is distributed and developed. The agency is key to the establishment of Jewish settlements, and Barak has been hankering for control of it since he took office in July.

Most important, Shas accepted Barak’s demand to refrain from trying to force new elections. In what would seem an odd move for a member of government, Shas earlier this month led the charge to call elections that would topple the government.

But the prime minister could not secure a promise from Shas that it will support future peace deals. That, said Shas Party leader Eli Yishai, would be “blackmail.”

“What is this, a sale?” Yishai said. “With all due respect, we return to the coalition as full partners. I am for peace and security. If we think the [peace] agreement is a good one, we will vote in favor. If not, we will not be able to promise automatic support. That would be wrong.”

Instead, Barak had to settle for a promise from Shas to support the peace process generally. Although its membership is rather hawkish, Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef has for 30 years advocated sharing land with Palestinians if it means furthering peace.

In that vein, the premier also invited Yishai to attend an eventual summit with Barak, President Clinton and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat that would conclude a comprehensive peace settlement, a senior government official said. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright arrives here next week to determine whether the time is ripe for a summit.

Israeli politics are typically characterized by high drama, brinkmanship and rudeness. But the drawn-out crisis of the last few weeks has been especially unseemly, with Cabinet ministers cursing each other on the floor of parliament, eleventh-hour negotiations, threats, insults and calls of racism.

Israel’s volatile mix was further agitated by changes in election laws in 1996 that provided for direct election of the prime minister in an otherwise parliamentary system. As a result, Barak won election by a landslide, but his One Israel Party received just 26 seats in the 120-member Knesset, or legislature. Building a coalition was the only way to rule, and Barak was determined to make his broadly inclusive, even though it paired natural enemies like Shas’ bearded, kippa-wearing, all-male delegation with the affluent, free-spirited leftists of Meretz.

Increasingly, Israelis are fed up. Angry faxes poured in Thursday to the headquarters of Barak’s party and Meretz. Commentators on Thursday evening were wondering if Israel will become a country of endemic political instability where governments collapse with numbing regularity.

“It is not only the Barak government which is falling apart,” noted the country’s leading political columnist, Nahum Barnea. “The entire political establishment is galloping wildly into the abyss. . . . It has lost all sense of shame.”

A Gallup Poll released last Friday showed that 55% of those surveyed disapproved of Barak’s handling of the coalition crisis; only 25% expressed satisfaction, and 59% said of Shas: Throw the bums out.

In the same poll, however, Barak continued to trounce any major opposition candidates who might challenge him for the premiership.

“We all know that we cannot make peace with our neighbors without first making peace at home, among us,” Barak said Thursday evening at a meeting of his party. He looked relieved but exhausted and warned pointedly against fanning the violence and hatred that have plagued Israeli society lately.

“I still believe that Shas’ continued participation in the government is important for national unity and the challenges ahead of us,” he said.