Premier Shimon Peres has firmly rejected the idea that his Labor Party would renege on its rotation agreement with the Likud before its October 13 implementation date.
But Peres, addressing a session of the Labor Party’s Central Committee in Tel Aviv Sunday, declared that Labor would not hesitate to quit the national unity government after the rotation if the Likud sought to force its own policies upon the unity government.
“If they (the Likud, after the rotation) violate the agreement about (West Bank) settlements, or if they impede the peace process, or if they conduct an economic policy that means (major) unemployment and inequitable sharing of the burden — we will not stay inside the government for a single moment,” Peres assured his Party.
At Peres’ behest, the Central Committee deferred deliberation on a motion presented by former Knesset member Michael Ben-Zohar, and supported by 104 Committee members out of a total of 901 members, proposing that Labor leave the unity government now. The proposal is to be discussed at the Party’s national convention April 8 in Tel Aviv.
IMPRESSED BY PERES’ DETERMINATION
Political observers were impressed by the deliberate tone of determination and certainty which the Prime Minister adopted in making his declaration in favor of implementing the rotation accord.
In previous statements, Peres has often referred to implementation of the rotation of the Prime Ministership as one of three linked elements in the unity government coalition accord — the other two being the peace policy and economic policy. Peres has tended to make the fulfillment of each conditional upon the other two — thereby appearing to leave an escape hatch out of fulfilling the rotation.
In his statement Sunday, however, Peres seemed to discount the possibility of the rotation not going into effect as scheduled. Instead, he applied the tripartite linkage doctrine to the Likud’s policy performance in the period following the rotation.
The question of whether Peres will go through with the rotation, which has constantly intrigued Laborites and outsiders, has taken on new vigor and immediacy in the wake of the aborted Herut Party convention earlier this month. Anti-rotation spokesmen in Labor argue that Deputy Premier Yitzhak Shamir, the Herut-Likud leader, is not fit politically to be entrusted with the premiership.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
