The 48-hour flap earlier this month over Ezer Weizman’s alleged contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization cast a revealing light on changing party politics in Israel, which may foreshadow events to come.
While the crisis was resolved by compromise before it became irreversible, the Likud-Labor coalition came within a hair’s breadth of collapse — and not because the maverick Weizman was considered unexpendable by his Laborite colleagues.
The unity government tottered because Vice Premier Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader, was able to put together at least the template of an alternative regime, based on a coalition led by Labor with support from the ultra-Orthodox parties.
The government did not fall, largely because of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who would rather be a junior partner in an alliance with Likud than see Peres become prime minister.
Rabin was able to save the government by brokering a compromise that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir readily accepted and Peres could not refuse.
The episode showed, however, that the religious bloc is no longer wedded to the nationalist camp represented by Likud. It also indicated that Peres’ camp in Labor is willing to pay the exorbitant political price demanded by the Orthodox to buy national leadership.
Rabin demonstrated once again his ability to frustrate Peres’ ambitions.
NO DEMAND ON ‘WHO IS A JEW’
But he may no succeed in the future if the crisis revolves around the precarious state of the peace process, rather than the fate of a Cabinet minister without much of a political following.
The Weizman crisis began at the weekly Cabinet meeting on Dec. 31. Shamir announced without warning that he was dismissing Weizman from the government, on charges that the dovish former air force commander had illegal meetings with officials of the PLO.
Weizman’s ouster from the government was to be effective 48 hours from the time it was announced, in conformity with law.
Labor was in a quandary. As Shamir leaked bits and pieces of information damaging to Weizman, his colleagues began distancing themselves.
But Peres accused Shamir of violating the letter and spirit of the coalition agreement: A Likud prime minister may not dismiss a Labor minister without the consent of the vice premier.
Peres and his associates used the statutory 48-hour waiting period to deftly knit together a new shadow coalition, with the Agudat Yisrael and Degel HaTorah parties as Labor’s partners.
The ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party Shas was considered almost certain to join, as well.
In agreeing to join, Agudah no longer demanded a guarantee that the “Who Is a Jew” amendment to the Law of Return be adopted by the Knesset. The amendment, fiercely opposed by most Diaspora Jews, would disqualify non-Orthodox converts to Judaism from receiving automatic Israeli citizenship upon making aliyah.
But Peres was prepared to offer the Orthodox an ironclad pledge that the status quo on religious matters would be unaltered and that their educational and social institutions would benefit from increased state funding.
Details of Labor’s successful wooing of the religious bloc came not from Peres — where it might have raised some skepticism — but from Shamir, who explained to the hard-line elements o Likud why he had to compromise on Weizman to save the government.
RABIN ENGINEERED DEAL
The compromise was relatively painless for Shamir.
While Weizman was allowed to retain his Cabinet portfolio as minister of science and development, which has little influence on affairs of state, he was forced to resign from the powerful Inner Cabinet, the government’s top policymaking forum of six Likud and six Labor senior ministers.
Shamir thereby removed one of his most outspoken critics from center stage and discredited him, to boot.
Shamir owes his political coup to Rabin, who engineered the deal. Aides to Peres say it was the second time Rabin has thwarted the prospect of Labor governing without Likud.
The first occurred during coalition negotiations after the December 1988 Knesset elections, when Labor was seeking to form a narrow government with the religious parties.
While Rabin was likely motivated in both cases by his personal rivalry with Peres, there are a number of other reasons why Laborites might oppose a narrow-based government.
To begin with, it would inevitably be short-lived and it would embroil Labor in electorally unpopular concessions to the Orthodox.
The party would pay dearly for them in the elections, which would be held sooner rather than later, given the fragility of such a narrow government.
On another level, the latest crisis appears to have highlighted an evolving new reality: The Orthodox are swinging toward Labor and were prepared to strike a deal even over so ostensibly unsavory and issue as a Labor minister’s alleged contacts with the hated PLO.
Rabin managed fairly easily to keep this in the realm of the hypothetical for the time being. The question is, but for how long?
BAKER GROWING IMPATIENT
While the defense minister is in Washington later this week, he is likely to be exposed to the irritation and frustration of Secretary of State James Baker because of the impasse in Middle East diplomacy.
The administration perceives Likud to be intransigent over American attempts to launch a preliminary Israeli-Palestinian dialogue that would lead to elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Americans point out that Israel itself proposed such elections as the centerpiece of its May 1989 peace plan. They now assert privately that Shamir and his foreign minister, Moshe Arens, are not committed to implementing their own plan.
Rabin, therefore, is likely to be told in bald terms that if there is no movement soon, the secretary will turn away form the Middle East conflict to invest his energies in more productive conflict-resolving efforts elsewhere.
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