Israeli Government unites

Press, 21 May 1987, Page 10

Israeli Government unites

By HOWARD GOLLER of Reuters NZPA Tel Aviv The Israeli Government has united to defeat noconfidence motions on Middle-East peace moves despite a Cabinet deadlock over the issue. By a show of hands, Parliament overwhelmingly rejected the motions of Leftist Opposition parties angered by a Cabinet failure to accept a United Nations-sponsored conference.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Rightist Likud bloc opposes the conference proposals of the Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, and the Labour Party. Labour is seeking support from smaller parties for early elections but joined Likud in defeating the motions.

Political analysts said Labour had the votes to pass a no-confidence motion but feared Likud would then have formed a narrow Government without it. Mr Peres told State radio he did not want his party engaging in a Parliamentary exercise.

Labour and its allies have 58 votes in the 120seat house — enough to top the 57 votes of Likud and its allies but short of the 61-vote majority re-

quired to force an election before they are scheduled to take place in November, 1988.

Explaining the Labour vote, the party Parliamentary leader, Rafi Edry, told reporters that in a speech for the Government, the Likud Transport Minister, Haim Corfu, had not rebutted the subject of an international conference and Mr Peres’ programme to advance the peace process. Another possible influence was an opinion poll in the "Yedioth Ahronoth” newspaper showing that 64 per cent of those questioned want the unity Government to continue. A Labour Party vote of <ioconfidence in its own Government could be unpopular. The Prime Minister summoned Mr Peres and the Defence Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, of Labour, to discuss how the Government would continue to function, State television said.

Mr Shamir opposes Mr Peres’s proposals for a peace conference leading to direct Arab-Israeli talks on grounds that Israel would be forced to return land captured in the 1967 Middle-East War.

Labour Party leaders said they would continue

looking for support for early elections. Labour formed a coalition with Likud in 1984 after Elections gave neither enough support to form a Government on its own.

"In my opinion, the Government will fall and we will go to elections, and if it’s not a question of days, then of weeks,” the Labour Party’s secretary, Uzi Baram, told reporters. Labour suffered a setback when the orthodox Shas party, a key broker in talks on early elections, announced it would rejoin the Cabinet and oppose an early poll in return for Likud support on Jewish religious issues. Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, of Shas, who resigned previously as Interior Minister, said he would return as Minister without portfolio and Shas would oppose elections so long as Likud enacted a bill in 60 days on Jewish conversions.

The bill would require all overseas Jewish conversions to receive the endorsement of Israel’s chief rabbis. Mr Peretz, an Orthodox rabbi, quit this year over a court order that he register as Jewish a woman converted by a liberal Reform rabbi.