Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is continuing to come under sharp criticism for his handling of the deportation crisis, and not only from the opposition parties.
Rabin was the target of a rare personal attack on the Knesset floor Wednesday from a member of his own party.
Labor Knesset member Haggai Merom chided Rabin for not getting along with his ministers and implied that the premier was making decisions unilaterally, without seeking proper advice.
“No minister should be prevented from speaking his conscience,” Merom said grimly. He charged there is “an atmosphere of fear” within the government.
Rabin, now under criticism domestically as well as internationally, retorted icily that any minister dissatisfied with the government could “find the door and walk out.”
Merom, a prominent member of the Labor Party and a representative of the kibbutz movement, also called on Rabin to control damaging leaks in the news media about the political infighting in the Cabinet.
“Shut the mouths of your top officials,” Merom told Rabin bluntly.
Knesset veterans said they could not recall an attack this severe against the prime minister led by a fellow member of the ruling party.
Rabin, seated at the Cabinet table, muttered angrily to Merom: “Vote no confidence in the government if you want!”
RUNNING A ONE-MAN SHOW?
But many leading media commentators said Thursday that Merom was merely voicing publicly what ministers and other top Labor figures were feeling privately: that Rabin is running a one-man-show and treating his ministers with indifference bordering on contempt.
“He speaks for them all,” wrote Orly Azulai, the well-informed political reporter of the mass-circulation daily Yediot Achronot.
The storm triggered by Merom’s remarks intensified when the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, Shimon Sheves, fired back a vituperative broadside at Merom.
“He’s frustrated because he did not get a Cabinet post or any other government job,” Sheves told reporters.
Sheves admitted that it was “irregular” for an appointed official to publicly criticize an elected official. But he said he was doing so in this case, because Merom had spoken “unfounded lies.”
Sheves followed up his public comments with an official letter to the Knesset speaker, Shevah Weiss, demanding that he “rein in” Merom.
Merom, for his part, confirmed that the butt of his criticism was indeed Sheves, whom he had not mentioned by name. “He interposes a wall between the prime minister and the other Cabinet members,” Merom wrote in the daily newspaper Ma’ariv.
In another interview, Merom said a “high official” in Rabin’s office had actually told Jus- tice Minister David Libai this week that the premier would not object if Libai were to resign.
Libai and Rabin had a heated exchange during a Cabinet meeting earlier this week, when Rabin tried to silence the minister during a debate on the deportations issue.
Libai was the only minister not to support Rabin during the original December vote to order the temporary expulsion of 415 Moslem fundamentalists to Lebanon.
Some political observers are interpreting this vehement clash as a reflection of an ongoing rivalry between Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres that dates back years. Merom, they say, belongs to the Peres camp.
Other commentators simply explained the incident as reflecting a loss of control that has pervaded the government, most obviously since the deportation decision in mid-December.
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