Israel the Morning After

...Meanwhile, Likud was provided with a credible example for its argument that a " Socialist economy" is inherently unviable...

...One was the near collapse of Koor, the country's largest industrial conglomerate, owned by the Labor Party-controlled Histadrut trade union confederation...

...Shamir responded to the discordant voices by starting out with a call for a "national coalition" that would include Labor as a junior, rather than an equal, partner...

...Moreover, the exaggerated demands of the small parties for ministerial portfolios and patronage posts would oblige Shamir to disappoint many younger members of his own party who were expecting to move up in the political structure...

...Whatever, on November 14 President Chaim Herzog finally asked the Prime Minister to form a new government...

...Defense Minister Yitzchak Rabin, who is at odds with his party leader, Shimon Peres, expressed the view that such an arrangement should be accepted to prevent the religious and extreme Right parties from gaining inordinate power...

...AN UNSTABLE POLITICAL SCENE Israel the Morning After BY ELIAHU SALPETER Tel Aviv Negative national and international reactions to the outcome of Israel's November 1 parliamentary elections notwithstanding, the basic health of the country's body politic suggests that there is less reason for alarm than the final tallies—and their possible short-term consequences —would seem to justify...

...Since four religious parties that previously held 12 seats this time won a total of 18, they became indispensable partners for any coalition...

...As the Oriental community has grown over the past decades, it has had a steadily increasing impact on voting patterns...

...The alternative, a Right-Orthodox coalition, would probably saddle Shamir with no less than six junior partners and still provide a relatively narrow Knesset majority...

...The outspoken pro-Jordanian Mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Freij, declared on Israel television the day after the elections that "things could have turned out differently, had the Arabs behaved differently six months ago...

...Any terrorist action, especially if it involves fatalities, heightens the Israeli public's level of hawkishness...

...Since they now want a bigger share of government budgets and are aware that getting it requires political clout, more religious lists competed for Knesset representation than previously and the competition among them was fiercer than ever...

...The second, rebellious generation turned to Likud...

...only slightly more than the half preferred the tougher stance of Shamir, who promised to suppress the Intifada by force and afterward discuss autonomy with the Palestinians "as laid down in the Camp David Agreement...

...Meanwhile, in Algiers the Palestine National Council, nominal parliamentof the PLO, had unilaterally declared the existence of a Palestine national state in the occupied territories...

...For one thing, the burning of a mother with her children immediately evokes dreadful memories of the Holocaust, associated with an "us against them" emotion—and Labor had been insisting that Israel must risk seeking accommodation with today's "them...

...But Shamir's biggest problem, regardless of the final makeup of his Cabinet, may be having to juggle his several patently contradictory promises to those who voted for him...

...Polls show that it takes about a week to subside, and leaves some more anti-Arab residue in its wake...

...In Israel itself the secular sector had staged large demonstrations opposing the religious minority's Sabbath observance standards and demanding electoral reform...

...The two developments were clearly interrelated: The main electoral contestants, the Likud Party headed by Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir and the Labor Party headed by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, each still had only about a third of the seats in the Knesset...

...The remarkable upsurge in the religious vote can be traced, first of all, to atwo-fold demographic phenomenon: The birth rate among the Orthodox is much higher than among the secular population, and "Oriental" or Sephardic families are proportionately more observant than those of European or American origin...

...So although a considerable majority of Israelis are secular, they can expect new Sabbath observance legislation and laws giving greater power to the Orthodox Rabbinate in matters of marriage, divorce and conversion...

...Moreover, Labor's campaign propaganda maintained that stationing Israeli troops along the Jordan River would provide enough security to permit the evacuation of most of the West Bank in exchange for peace, but the attack on the bus occurred in the Jordan Valley, seemingly proving Likud's charge that its chief opponents' security notions were fallacious and dangerous...

...When on the eve of the voting, partly at Peres' prodding, Hussein indicated he might re-enter the picture after all, his words had a hollow interventionist ring...

...The 11-monthold Intifada has so far been less costly to the individual Israeli (in extended reserve military service, in terms of an increased tax burden, in economic loss) than to the country as a whole, but it exacerbated anti-Arab sentiments to the advantage of Likud and the far Right parties...

...In this case, the pro-Right, antiLabor effect was stronger than usual...

...It also very tentatively announced its acceptance of UN resolutions 242 and 338, marking thestart of a campaign to rally international support against Israel on the Palestine issue...

...to improve welfare programs and raise the overall standard of living, yet reduce the present 15-16 per cent inflation to a single digit...

...All the religious parties, irrespective of the disputes among them, are much closer to Right-of-Center Likud than to Left-of-Center Labor...

...In addition, the rank and file of the now disenfranchised Kach Party— mostly alienated, less educated Oriental youths—having lost their "own voice," on the whole cast their ballots for Shas, the Sephardic religious party that obtained the largest number of seats (six) in the new Knesset after Likud (40) and Labor (39...

...Second, the total number of votes secured by the small extreme Right parties (who inherited some of the Kach support) actually declined...

...While Labor and Likud did not register any substantial gains at the polls, the Prime Minister's bloc moved further to the Right during the campaign...

...Nevertheless, on November 2 Israelis did wake up to a significantly changed political scene...

...Herzog's decision followed the religious parties' announcement that they would support a Likud administration...

...Even before the balloting, the Supreme Court ruled that because of its racist program the ultra-Right Kach Party, led by Americanborn Rabbi Meir Kahane, had contravened the newly amended electoral law (passed with the joint approval of the Labor Party and the Likud bloc) and therefore could not participate in the contest...

...Labor, of course, had made it clear that it would not negotiate with the PLO so long as it failed to give up terrorism and delete the call for Israel's demise from its charter...

...Palestinian spokesmen, in turn, reiterated (at least publicly) that only the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) could speak on their behalf...

...Eliahu Salpeter, a regular NL contributor, is a correspondent for Ha'aretz...

...Whether it is true that the Jericho incident cost Labor four Knesset seats or only one or two, as the bickering factions inside the party argued after the elections, there was certainly some substance to the observation by analysts here that Labor did not do at all badly given the circumstances: If, despite the Intifada, the collapse of the Histadrut enterprises, Hussein's "betrayal" of the international peace conference plan, and the Jericho bus attack the party stayed practically even with Likud, without these mishaps it might well have won impressively...

...Prior to the uprising, public opinion polls indicated that Labor had an impressive lead over the rest of the field...

...What caused the overall shift toward the hawkish Right...

...The incident took place on the outskirts of Jericho...

...Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, Likud found it necessary to stress that the aim of its hawkish policies was to achieve peace with the Arabs, not encourage confrontation...

...In the '50s and '60s the religious parties also had 18 Knesset seats, but they were then dominated by strongly Zionist-oriented moderates and participated in the Labor coalitions that ran the country from 1948 until Menachem Begin came to the fore in June 1977...

...In the political realm, the chances of defusing the Palestinian uprising have worsened, and the prospects of an IsraeliArab peace have receded...

...Likud, naturally, countered that these were not coincidental calamities but reflected the innate weaknesses of Labor's ideology and policies...

...Essentially, it was a reaction to some long-term problems and some last-minute incidents...

...On the ot her hand, it should be noted that on the fundamental issue of territorial concessions in exchange for peace, the electorate was almost evenly divided...

...That is a sure prescription for governmental instability...

...The violence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip made many voters more receptive to Likud's messages of fear and warnings against taking chances than to Labor's messages urging hope and the taking of risks for peace...

...Thus, once more neither could form a government without obtaining sufficient backing from the minor parties to command a total of 61 votes in the 120-member Parliament...

...On the broader plane, though, probably the single unpredictable event that strengthened the hand of the Right was the terrorist attack on a Tiberias-to-Jerusalem bus 36 hours before the voting started...

...Hawkish elements in Labor and moderates in Likud favored this approach...

...Besides being bad in itself, this highlighted the lengthy list of Koor-affiliated enterprises that have gone under in recent months...

...The second and more crucial matter was the absence of any Arab response to Labor's promise to pursue a negotiated peace...

...The first generation of Sephardic Jews voted for the then ruling Labor Party...

...Jordan's King Hussein, touted as the prospective partner in this effort, in fact pulled the rug from under Peres a few months earlier by renouncing all claims to representing the Palestinians and telling Israel to talk to them directly...

...The nation had noticeably shifted to the Right, and the power of its religious minority had increased dramatically...

...Two objective realities worked in Likud's favor as well...

...He promised to break the Intifada with an iron fist, yet maintain friendly relations with the United States...

...Indeed, there is a virtually natural symbiosis between the Right and the religious parties, who together now hold 65 Knesset seats against 55 for the Left and the Arab parties...

...The elections confirmed, if confirmation was necessary, that smear tactics are more effective than facts, and that it is easier to arouse emotions than to appeal to logic...

...Many of these people are today disenchanted with both parties, however, and are "coming back" to the religious formations...

...This, plus the Rightward swing of the expanded religious bloc has tipped the scales...

...Perhaps because Labor knew the religious parties would ultimately go with the Prime Minister, it reportedly agreed to each of their demands, placing him in the position of having to make more concessions than he may have wanted to...

...Another factor contributing to the surprising showing of the religious parties has to do with their increasing constituencies depending more heavily than the secular sector on public funds for education and welfare services...

...The failure to deliver on such promises could in fairly short order undo what in any case is likely to be an unstable government...

...Consequently, in mid-campaign, Labor was obliged to scuttle its persuasive criticism of the previous Likud government's mismanagement, which produced threedigit inflation and economic chaos...

...Of the first group, the Arab rioting was probably the most important...

...Close to half of the Israelis were willing to give Peres the opportunity to try and negotiate from an openly conciliatory position...

...to hold on to every inch of the West Bank, yet make progress toward peace...

...a 26-year-old mother and her three small children were burned alive in the bus...

...This not only produced a greater turnout of religious voters but sharply raised the percentage of ultra-Orthodox who will be members of Parliament...

...During the preceding two weeks they had shuttled back and forth between the Labor and Likud camps, flexing their new political muscle with a naive arrogance as they ostensibly sought to determine who would back their legislative program and grant them the greatest number of Cabinet and administrative posts...

...From the United States came warnings of the divisiveness that would result if the Law of Return were changed to comply with Orthodox nonrecognition of conversions performed by Conservative or Reform rabbis...

...Third, Likud suffered its biggest losses in Jerusalem, where Israelis have the broadest daily exposure to both the peaceful and the violent sides of coexistence with the Arabs...

...When the hard process of putting together a government actually began— just as this was being written—Shamir faced a host of conflicting pressures...