News Analysis: Prime Minister Courts Yi’ud and Shas in Effort to Expand a Tenuous Majority

Anxious to broaden its tenuous hold on a governing majority, the Labor Party has begun coalition talks with Yi’ud, a three-member faction that recently broke away from Rafael Eitan’s Tsomet Party.

At the same time, an incident involving a radio interview on Shabbat demonstrated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s continuing desire to woo Shas, the fervently religious Sephardic faction, back into his coalition.

Although the rightist opposition, led by the Likud, does not have the arithmetical potential of setting up an alternative government, the narrowness of the Rabin government’s current parliamentary margin makes for constant tensions in ongoing Knesset business.

The talks with Yi’ud follow that party’s decision, after long internal wrangling, to negotiate with Rabin and his ministers.

Yi’ud’s leader, Knesset member Gonen Segev, has been offered the post of minister of energy — a portfolio currently held by Labor’s Moshe Shahal, who is also minister of police.

Yi’ud’s Alex Goldfarb is to become a deputy minister if the talks succeed.

That “if” depends primarily on Yi’ud’s third Knesset member, Esther Salmovitz, who put up a dogged fight within the party against joining the government and who still maintains that her hawkish positions on peace and security will eventually foil the negotiations with Labor.

Salmovitz, a deputy Knesset speaker, says she has managed to inject wording into Yi’ud’s platform on these policy issues that will make it nearly impossible to reach agreement with Labor. She considers herself firmly a member of the “national camp,” she says, and opposes the peace process that the current government has launched with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Rabin is said to be undeterred by Salmovitz’s tough talk. Indeed he has signaled — not for the first time — that he would like to bring Tsomet itself into his government, and make party leader Rafael Eitan a minister.

The two men have a comradeship dating back to Palmach days, when they fought together in the pre-state Jewish underground.

Eitan for his part declared over the weekend that Tsomet, which now has five seats in the Knesset, would enter coalition negotiations only alongside the National Religious Party, which has six seats.

On Labor’s left flank, meanwhile, Meretz, with its 12 seats in the governing coalition, has reiterated its own determined opposition, on ideological grounds, to the entry into the coalition of either Tsomet or NRP.

Meretz, however, has given the go-ahead for talks with Yi’ud.

Political observers interpret Rabin’s desultory wooing of Tsomet as designed mainly to bring pressure to bear on Shas, which has been sitting on the fence for more than six months, neither fully out of the coalition nor yet fully in it.

Labor-Shas negotiations were proceeding well during the spring, until a row over the wording of a new law on citizens’ rights angered Shas’ spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

Now, the Orthodox party is demanding that the so-called religous “status quo” — to which Labor and Meretz are committed under the original Labor-Meretz-Shas coalition agreement — be enshrined in legislation so as to protect it, in Shas’ view, from erosion at the hands of the Supreme Court.

Meretz, while professing its continuing commitment to the status quo, has rejected the need to enact legislation on the subject.

A RIFT WITHIN SHAS

Beyond the legalistic argument, however, some observers detect a rift within Shas, with Yosef pushing for reconciliation with the government, in the interests both of the peace process and of Shas’ own concerns.

But Shas’ political leader, Knesset member Aryeh Deri, is reluctant for Shas to move back into the government.

Deri, facing charges of fraud, has been barred by the High Court of Justice from holding Cabinet office pending a verdict in his case. Deri is apparently concerned that if Shas does return to the government, another of its Knesset members would hold the powerful Interior Ministry portfolio.

Rabin’s keen desire to see Shas back within the coalition fold was amply illustrated this weekend when the prime minister agreed, under Yosef and Deri’s urging, to forgo a live interview on Israel Radio that would have taken place on Saturday morning before a live audience.

The interview was to be part of a program marking the midway point in the present government’s term of office. Yosef ruled the broadcast would be “chilul shabbat befarhessya,” a public violation of the Shabbat. He threatened parliamentary retribution if Rabin went ahead with it.

Rabin decided to cancel the interview on Saturday morning, and instead prerecorded it at his Tel Aviv home on Friday night.

Ironically, that, too, involved a desecration of the Shabbat by the journalists and technicians involved in the interview. But Shas could look aside, since it was done in the privacy of Rabin’s home and the program, when broadcast on Saturday morning, was not broadcast live.

Coalition chairman Eli Dayan, a Labor Party Knesset member, is meanwhile urging Rabin to pay one of his periodic personal visits to Yosef in the hope of finalizing a renewed coalition deal between the two parties.