Behind the Headlines How is This Crisis Different?

“Wherefore is this crisis different from all other crises?” This was one of the questions that political observers were pondering here as the week began with the decision of Premier Menachem Begin’s Cabinet to dissolve the Knesset and hold elections July 7.

Granted, Finance Minister Yigal Hurwitz resigned last Sunday and took his three-man Rafi faction out of the coalition and out of the Likud. But senior ministers have resigned before from Begin’s cabinet, including Hurwitz himself, who quit as commerce minister in 1978 in protest at the Camp David agreements. The storms their resignations caused soon subsided.

The answer–the key to the unique finality of this particular crisis–lies only partly in Parliamentary arithmetic. The government without Rafi would be hard put to maintain its majority in the Knesset.

The more fundamental answer lies in the realm of political psychology. The accumulation of problems, the succession of crises and defections, the deterioration of the economy, the withering criticism of the entire press–all these together brought the majority of the coalition leaders, and Begin at their head, to the conclusion that enough is enough.

In any case, this government will have served by July slightly more than a full four-year term, which is longer than any previous government in Israel’s history. Begin would have liked to go the whole stretch until November, the statutory end of the Knesset’s term. But he is said to be consoled by the four-year record.

EARLY ELECTIONS NOT A DISASTER

The fact that the government did reach this conclusion, however reluctantly–some would say belatedly–is in itself a good omen for the essential health and inner stability of Israel’s democracy.

“Early elections are not a disaster,” Foreign Minister (and Begin’s heir-presumptive) Yitzhak Shamir said in a radio interview last week. “They are a common enough occurrence in the best and longest established or parlimentary democracies.”

Arithmetically, say Likud floor-managers in the Knesset, the government could have carried on. Indeed, the diehards Ariel Sharon and David Levy of Herut, proved to Begin with pencil and paper during the past week that there are enough floating votes to be had from Knesset lone backbench mavericks to ensure the government a 61 vote majority in any confidence motion.

But, Begin, Shamir, Yosef Burg and Simcha Ehrlich, the leading figures in the main coalition parties, remained unconvinced. They explained privately that although normally a majority of one in a democratic parliament is sufficient, in this case it would be politically and morally wrong for the government to rest on the votes of one-and two-man spinoffs from the long-defunct and practically forgotten Democratic Movement for Change. “After all,” one coalition leader remarked, “Whom do they represent now apart from themselves?”

Begin himself, with his finely honed sense of honor and political propriety, recoiled from the prospect of making 11th hour “deals” with the lone Knesset members to purchase their loyalty to his coalition.

COLLECTIVE SURVIVAL INSTINCT

While the issue in dispute between Hurwitz and Education Minister Zevulun Hammer–major pay rises for the country’s 60,000 teachers–was truly weighty and even crucial, given the state of the economy, everyone at the Cabinet table felt that economic considerations were not Hurwitz’s sole motivation.

Ironically, Hurwitz, little Known outside Israel, succeeded where the two men of international renown in Begin’s cabinet, Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman, abysmally failed. Neither their resignations, nor Weizman’s subsequent ouster from Herut, shook the government for longer than a week or two. The collective survival instinct of the various components of the coalition quickly overcome any regrets that some of them felt over Dayan’s and Weizman’s departures.

The government’s prestige abroad suffered heavy blows, however, from the departures of these two stars, but at home, matters soon returned to business as usual.

That was also the case when, 14 months ago, Begin lost his first Finance Minister, Simcha Ehrlich, who fled before an unprecedented barrage of press and public criticism. Ironically, it was Hurwitz then who saved the day by rejoining the government to take over the Treasury. Ehrlich, in an interview last week said with ill-concealed gratification, “I never expected great achievements from him… but I didn’t think he’d fail so fast.”

Hurwitz certainly would seem to have failed to improve the economic situation, at least if inflation statistics are a yardstick. He insists they are not. The year end figures in that area show his performance to have been worse than Ehrlich’s.

But he did succeed in creating the circumstances in which a tired government could do what it appears to have itself wanted to do: End its term with honor and go to the nation for a renewed mandate.