High Court Deals Labor a Setback, Refusing to Advance Knesset Vote

The Labor Party and its left-wing allies received a setback Wednesday, when the High Court of Justice refused to advance the date of a crucial Knesset referendum on Israel’s political crisis.

The fate of the coalition government will therefore be decided Thursday, when the Knesset is scheduled to debate a series of no-confidence motions.

Labor is expected to support those motions, in an attempt to bring down the government. But it had hoped to have the vote take place before a series of resignations from Labor ministers officially take effect.

The resignations were tendered Tuesday morning, after Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir fired Vice Premier Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader. Under Israeli law, both the dismissal and the resignations take place after a 48-hour “cooling-off period.”

Labor, joined by the Mapam party and the Citizens Rights Movement, had petitioned the High Court to require the Knesset vote to take place before the expiration of the “cooling-off period.”

This would have allowed the Labor ministers to remain in the transitional administration that will be put into power if the government falls. But once the resignations go into effect, Shamir is expected to quickly replace the Laborites with Likud ministers before the government falls.

A three-judge panel of the High Court issued its decision against Labor’s petition Wednesday, after three hours of hearings and another three hours of closed deliberations.

LIKUD MENDING INTERNAL WOUNDS

While the court rejected advancing the vote date, it passed critical comment on the Knesset speaker, Dov Shilansky, and his deputy, Ovadia Eli, who scheduled the debate for Thursday. Both are members of Shamir’s Likud bloc, which is hoping to muster enough votes to defeat the no-confidence motions.

The court said that Deputy Speaker Eli had acted “wrongly,” but decided that it would not interfere with the internal workings of the legislative body.

Responding on Israel Radio, Eli insisted that “what counts is the verdict, and the verdict endorsed my decision.”

Ran Cohen of CRM said Wednesday afternoon that his party would attempt to appeal the speaker’s decision in the Knesset House Committee –and still try to have the confidence motion moved to later Wednesday. But as the day wore on, it appeared unlikely that he would succeed.

Within Likud, meanwhile, the government crisis appeared to draw the previously feuding factions closer together. In a lengthy speech to the party’s Knesset faction Wednesday morning, Shamir urged unity inside both the Likud and the entire “nationalist camp.”

Shamir met alone earlier with his deputy, David Levy, the minister of construction and housing, who has been a leading critic of the premier’s peace policies. Observers said Levy’s decision to show up at the faction meeting signaled a significant change of direction.

Another leading rival of the premier’s, Knesset member Ariel Sharon, spoke briefly at the faction caucus, urging party loyalty in the face of efforts to topple the government.

POSSIBLE DEFECTIONS ON THE RIGHT

Labor will need only one defection from Likud or any of the other parties to bring down the government if it succeeds in winning support from the Agudat Yisrael party, which has hinted it might throw its weight in that direction.

Shamir’s immediate problem Wednesday was to try to ensure that he could rely on the support of five Knesset members who recently defected from Likud’s Liberal Party faction and announced they were forming their own party.

The premier was trying to arrange a private meeting with the leader of the splinter group, Economics and Planning Minister Yitzhak Moda’i.

But the Moda’i group was in a state of enhanced resentment Wednesday morning, following another session of the Knesset House Committee in which their request to be recognized as a separate faction was once again foiled by a Likud filibuster.

The group blames Shamir confidant Haim Corfu, chairman of the House Committee, for engineering the procedural defeat of their plan to set up shop as an independent faction within Likud. Its members implied that their support for the Shamir government could not be guaranteed in view of the treatment they had received from Likud.

The political grapevine Wednesday speculated that Moda’i could be brought back into the fold if Shamir offered him a tempting portfolio in any Likud-led government that might be formed.

Other Likud ministers, meanwhile, were working Wednesday to guarantee support in the upcoming test of parliamentary strength from the far-right party Moledet, which has not yet pledged its votes.