Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was set for a day of political horse-trading on Friday in his bid to form a new government, and avoid snap polls, after the centre-left Labour party walked out of the coalition in a row over the budget.
The government collapsed on Wednesday as Defence Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer and other Labour members quit right-wing Prime Minister Sharon’s government, throwing the country into a fresh crisis. Sharon’s first move on Thursday was to offer the defence job to tough former army chief of staff Shaul Mofaz.
The two men met late on Thursday. Before the meeting, the word was that Mofaz had agreed in principle to accept the post. Afterwards government sources said that Mofaz had asked for a few days to consider the offer. Even as Labour jolted Israeli politics, violence flared in the Palestinian territories.
Three Gaza City Hamas activists died on Thursday when they accidentally blew up explosives and an Israeli soldier shot dead a militant in a roadside gunbattle in the West Bank. The Israeli government was almost certain to lurch further to the right as Sharon courted ultra-nationalist and pro-settler parties to join his cabinet, in a bid to thwart Labour’s efforts to trigger new elections by the spring.
However Sharon has assured US President George Bush that Israel’s policies will remain unchanged despite the collapse of the old government, a government source said Friday. The US government insisted that the Israeli political crisis had not changed US objectives in the Middle East, but there were fears that it could be a new complication in the US campaign for tough action against Iraq.
”The prime minister will be busy today with a series of contacts to form a stable new government and a majority in the parliament,” cabinet secretary Gideon Saar told public radio on Thursday. ”The majority of parliament members do not want elections,” he added.
Mofaz, who has called for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s deportation, flew back from a tour of Britain and accepted the offer from Sharon to replace Ben Eliezer, one official said earlier on Thursday.
Sharon, a burly former general, seemed determined to stay the course, after Ben Eliezer toppled the government. Labour pulled out after last-minute talks with Sharon failed to reach a compromise over Israel’s 2003 austerity budget. It was angered by high subsidies allotted for Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The row was largely viewed as a ploy by Ben Eliezer to garner favour with his party’s dovish wing ahead of a November 19 Labour leadership primary.
But Sharon clearly wished to fend off his rival’s maneuver to call a national election before the end of his term in October 2003. Another factor in his decision not to call snap elections was the spectre of Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and rival for power in his Likud party.
Labour’s walkout also granted Sharon the opportunity to press on with his strong-armed military tactics with which he has tried to crush the two-year-old Palestinian uprising. Sharon was due to hold talks with MP Avigdor Lieberman, who heads an extreme-right coalition, on a partnership which would give the premier a majority of 62 seats in the 120-member parliament. Lieberman vowed several days ago not to rescue the prime minister if Labour quit, but he was coming under heavy pressure from his own supporters, Israeli radio said. – Sapa-AFP