Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin begins a 10-day visit to North America this week confident that his governing coalition is remaining intact — at least for the moment.
An effort by the opposition to introduce a bill dissolving the Knesset came crashing down on Wednesday when two fervently religious parties, Shas and Agudat Yisrael, made it plain they would vote against it.
The Likud and Tsomet parties, which were sponsors of the bill, quickly withdrew it. Knesset house rules forbid the introduction of bills to dissolve the government more than once in six months.
“We want to keep the option,” Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu explained.
“We’ll wait for another opportunity,” said Tsomet’s Rafael Eitan.
The two religious parties had been wooed and won in an intensive effort by Labor leaders, headed by Rabin himself.
Labor Party officials spent hours with Agudat Yisrael’s Avraham Shapiro, Menachem Porush and Shmuel Halpert on Tuesday, during which time they discussed the party’s demands for greater government support for schools and yeshivot.
Avraham Ravitz, the fourth Knesset member of the United Torah Judaism movement — which embraces Agudat Yisrael and Degel HaTorah — refused to attend Tuesday’s meeting.
Ravitz, under tight orders from Degel’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Eliezer Schach, said he would continue to oppose the Rabin government.
But the support of the three Agudah men was a coup for Rabin, who next turned his attention to Shas’ spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, at a midnight meeting in the sage’s Jerusalem home.
The results of this meeting were mixed: Although Shas refused to support the opposition’s government-dissolution effort Wednesday, it nonetheless refused to rejoin the Labor-led coalition at this time.
Yosef reportedly voiced his concerns about the security situation in the territories, indicating that his constituency is uncomfortable with the idea of his party lending its support to the Labor government’s peace negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Yosef’s decision on whether Shas will rejoin the coalition will apparently come only after Rabin’s return from his trip to North America.
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