Nrp Calls for a Unity Government That Would Postpone Reply to U.S.

The National Religious Party has given Likud and Labor until Wednesday morning to agree to form a new unity government.

“I believe it’s in the cards,” Rabbi Yitzhak Levy, NRP’s secretary-general said Monday night, after separate meetings with acting Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Likud and the two Labor Party leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

The sticking point is that under the NRP plan, the new government would have two months before deciding how to proceed with the peace process.

The NRP proposal was “not rejected” by Shamir, who said he had to consult with his Likud colleagues before replying, Levy told reporters.

But Peres and Rabin –who, according to the rabbi, were “hardly broadcasting on the same wavelength” — balked at the two-month hiatus. They consider it urgent that a new Israeli government respond quickly to U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.

The NRP clearly prefers a broad-based government to a narrow regime from which one of the two major parties would be missing.

But should its efforts fail, it would probably join a narrow Likud-led government, Levy said, adding that it would be up to the party’s Executive to decide.