A Matter of Mathematics

By James Kelly

The voters fail to pick a winner, and the haggling begins

For a campaign that was almost totally devoid of passion, the finale was decidedly dramatic. At Labor Party headquarters in a Tel Aviv hotel, supporters giddy with hope eagerly awaited the returns. Across town, in an auditorium draped in blue-and-white bunting, Likud backers stood around glumly, like pallbearers at a funeral. At 10 p.m., as polls closed around the country, all eyes at both headquarters turned to the TV screens. But wait. Anchorman Haim Yavin announced that there would be a delay before the first projections could be broadcast; an error had been made in feeding data into the computers. The minutes ticked away. Finally, at 10:20, Yavin delivered the first prediction: 46 seats for Labor, 43 for Likud.

It was closer, much closer than Labor had expected or Likud had dared to hope. Broad smiles appeared on the faces of Likud supporters as they burst into applause. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, it seemed, might have a chance of staying in office. At Labor headquarters, the fans of Party Leader Shimon Peres looked stunned. "It can't be, it can't be," they muttered.

But it was, even though the final figures shifted slightly three days later to give Labor 44 seats to Likud's 41. The rival political leaders largely kept their reactions private, but there was no mistaking their emotional response: dismay on the part of Peres and elation from Shamir. Said Peres to a friend: "It's all over."

Since neither of the two large groups even approached a majority in the 120-member Knesset, Shamir and Peres immediately began to woo the leaders of 13 smaller parties in the hope of forming a coalition that could muster at least 61 seats. Day after day, potential allies trooped in to state their conditions to Shamir and Peres. Rarely had the process seemed so fractured and complex. Though Labor had won the most seats, Likud appeared to be in a slightly better position to piece together a government because the splinter parties that are ideologically closer to Likud fared better. The next step will be for the country's President, Chaim Herzog, to ask either Shamir or Peres to try to forge a coalition. But even Herzog, whose sympathies favor Labor, was delaying his choice until it became clearer which leader had a better chance of succeeding.

The scramble to stitch together a patchwork coalition raised new doubts about the country's ability to solve its most pressing problems: how to cool 400% inflation, whether to withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon, what to do about the occupied West Bank, how best to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace. Any new government, whether cobbled together by Labor or by Likud, promises to be a rickety, splintered structure that could collapse at any moment. "A divided nation remains divided," editorialized the Jerusalem Post. Said Ma'ariv, a Tel Aviv daily: "The greatest disappointment was that neither of the two major political blocs will be able to put together a lasting government."

For Labor, which had nurtured a cozy lead in opinion polls right up to voting day, the result came as a cold surprise. It underscored two basic flaws that party leaders thought they had overcome: Peres' weakness as a campaigner and, in the long run more worrisome, the party's continuing inability to appeal to the Sephardic Jewish immigrants from North Africa. Labor's failure to do better was all the more glaring because Peres' opponent was not, as in 1977 and 1981, the impassioned Menachem Begin but the untried and colorless Shamir. The outcome confirmed that the Sephardim, who now constitute a majority of Israel's population, have become a potent political force. Many of them hold a grudge against Labor for supposedly neglecting their needs during the 1950s and 1960s.

The indisputable winners last week were some of the country's small parties, which tend to have a religious or ideological basis. They picked up a total of 35 seats, ten more than in 1981. Tehiya, a rightist offshoot of Likud, fared best with five seats, while Yahad, a party founded last March by the popular Ezer Weizman, who resigned as Begin's Defense Minister in 1980, won three. The Kach movement, an ultranationalist group headed by Brooklyn-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, who retains his U.S. citizenship,* won its first seat. "In my first [Knesset] speech, I am going to make an issue of throwing out the Arabs," he said. "We will drive this country crazy. We will make this country Jewish again."

Israel's electoral process not only protects the small parties but virtually guarantees that no single group can win a majority. The country's citizens cast their ballots for a party, not an individual candidate. Any group that receives 1% of the vote automatically earns a place in the Knesset; the seats are then divided proportionally among the various parties that qualify. Israelis may argue that the method ensures democratic diversity, but it also can produce paralysis.

Barely had the votes been counted than Labor and Likud leaders began bargaining for support from the smaller parties. Labor could count on the centrist Shinui party and the leftist Citizens' Rights Movement, with three seats each, to reach 50. The Likud bloc knew it would be strengthened not only by Tehiya's five seats but by the two won by Morasha, a hard-line religious party, for a total of 48. Two predominantly Arab parties, the Communist Hadash and the new Jewish-Arab Progressive List for Peace, do not figure in any calculations, since neither Labor nor Likud would accept their six seats in a coalition government.

The mathematical realities thus forced Peres and Shamir to focus their attention on three parties: Weizman's three-seat Yahad; the National Religious Party, a mainstream Orthodox group whose four members devoutly believe that the West Bank belongs to Israel; and the Sephardic Torah Guardians, a rigidly Orthodox organization that won four seats.

As the negotiations dragged on, Shamir repeated an offer he had made on election night: to have Labor join Likud in a government of "national unity." That solution was tried once before, on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, when the country's survival seemed at stake. It lasted three years. A new government of national unity would shut out most of the small parties, thereby preventing them from using their pivotal position to exert more influence than their numbers should allow. More important, it would create a government with enough authority to make the difficult decisions necessary for tackling the country's economic problems.

Even the hermitic Begin, who did not leave his Jerusalem apartment to vote last week, gave his blessing to the idea of a coalition of the two major blocs. "There are very serious problems in the country," Begin said. "I think it would be a good idea." After two days of silence, Peres let it be known that he agreed with Shamir's idea, but only if he could head the government. Labor officials privately admitted that Peres' gesture was a tactical move designed to appease public demands for bipartisanship. Shamir reacted as Peres probably knew, and hoped, he would: he just as discreetly rejected the proposal.

Peres received more bad news on Thursday, when the ballots of Israeli soldiers were counted and a seat that Labor initially thought it had won shifted to Likud's ally Tehiya. Meanwhile, Weizman joined forces with the one-seat TAMI party, a Sephardic group that has proved a troublesome ally for Shamir in the past. Weizman, now representing a minibloc of four, conferred with Peres for 2 1/2 hours on Thursday night at a seaside hotel north of Tel Aviv. On Friday he met with Shamir for two hours in Jerusalem. Like a coquette holding out for the best prom invitation, Weizman reportedly listened to Likud's promise to make him Finance, Defense or Foreign Minister, then gave Labor 48 hours to match the offer. "My heart is torn," he said. "This is one of the most fateful decisions of my life."

Though Weizman managed the Likud's successful 1977 campaign, he abruptly resigned from the Begin government in 1980 out of a growing conviction that it was not living up to the spirit of the Camp David peace accords. Even if Weizman joins Labor, however, Peres would still need another seven votes to reach a majority.

Whoever is first asked by President Herzog to form a coalition will have six weeks to try to do so; if he fails, Herzog will most probably turn to his opponent. It is entirely possible that by September, Israelis will still not know who their new Prime Minister is. Predicted TAMI Leader Aharon Abuhatzeira: "For both sides, it will be negotiations not of days but of weeks." The worst-case possibility is that neither Shamir nor Peres can put together a coalition, in which case Herzog would continue to seek a potential government leader, or eventually call new elections.

Though U.S. officials refused to comment publicly on the Israeli result, they could hardly conceal their disappointment that Labor had failed to score a decisive victory. Washington preferred Peres largely because it believed that a Labor government would resuscitate the Arab-Israeli peace process and prove generally more amenable to U.S. policies.

The State Department was particularly interested in Peres' intention to begin negotiations to withdraw 22,000 Israeli troops from southern Lebanon within a few months and in his proposal to invite Jordan's King Hussein to enter negotiations on the future of the West Bank.

"Those who were privy to all this were praying like crazy for a Labor win," said a senior U.S. diplomat last week. "Now it's all out the window for the most part."

Other U.S. officials pointed out that President Reagan, in the heat of his own reelection battle, would not welcome any new Middle East peace initiatives before November. Until then, said a State Department aide, "torpor is best."

Yet events will not stand still while Israel sorts out the consequences of its election. The Lebanese government withdrew its guards at the Israeli liaison office in a Beirut suburb last week, as a means of forcing Jerusalem to close the building and bring home the 30 officials who worked there. Lebanese Prime Minister Rashid Karami had been pressing Israel for months to shut the office, but Shamir had refused to abandon what amounted to the last shred of the May 17, 1983, withdrawal agreement negotiated by his predecessor Begin.

The Reagan Administration also recognized the larger reality of Syrian influence in Lebanon last week. Testifying before a House subcommittee, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy declared that Syria has been "a helpful player" in healing the rifts among Lebanon's combative factions. That assessment was markedly different from what U.S. officials were saying about the regime of Syrian President Hafez Assad as recently as two months ago, when 261 U.S. Marines were still deployed in Lebanon. But "times have changed," noted Murphy, a former Ambassador to Damascus. Syria, he explained, had pursued a policy of confrontation with the U.S. and Israel as long as its aim was to torpedo the Lebanese-Israeli security agreement. Once that had been achieved, Syria apparently realized that it was in its interest to shift tactics and begin to search for ways to help stabilize Lebanon.

Democratic members nonetheless professed amazement at the abrupt switch in tone. "If someone throws you down a well a hundred feet and then they haul you up fifty feet, you feel a lot better," observed Democratic Representative Larry Smith of Florida. "But you never would have been down there in the first place if they hadn't thrown you down." Israel's immediate challenge, however, is at home, not with its neighbors. The country must solve not just the temporary problem of creating a new government but the more lasting one of how to translate its political will and vi brant democracy into stronger, more effective leadership.

-- By James Kelly. Reported by Harry Kelly and Robert Slater/Jerusalem

* Kahane may be subject to a U.S. law that strips citizenship from Americans who hold office in foreign governments. Revocation is not automatic; the State Department must determine whether the person acted with the intent of giving up his citizenship.

With reporting by Harry Kelly; Robert Slater