Israel Why Is This Man So Glum?

Israel's national unity government is an apt reflection of the population it serves: argumentative, divisive and incapable of achieving consensus on how to deal with the Palestinian question. Now the latest attempt at unity is faltering after seven months, as the country's two major parties bump heads over the future course of a peace plan that calls for elections in the occupied territories. Bowing to pressures from hard-liners within his Likud bloc, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir two weeks ago saddled the proposal with conditions that are anathema to the Palestinians. Labor Party leaders responded last week by voting to quit the government. The move, yet to be ratified by the party's 1,300-member Central Committee, threatens not only to wreck the coalition but also to kill the peace plan.

Arguing that the basic proposal was still intact, Shamir called Labor's impending withdrawal "misguided." Labor leader Shimon Peres countered that "there is no reason to remain in the government," but invited Shamir to "retract" the appended conditions, which include barring East Jerusalem's 140,000 Palestinian residents from participating in the elections. The Bush Administration signaled its irritation by reviving talk of an international peace conference, an option repellent to Shamir. In a New York Times interview, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, called the Likud stipulations a "deadly blow," but he did not torpedo the plan.

Labor's decision to delay the Central Committee vote until perhaps early August was viewed as an attempt to seek reconciliation. Labor's reluctance to leave the government is not surprising; a recent opinion poll indicates that a new election would result in victory for Likud.

The U.S. struggled to keep the plan afloat, but each move served only to further sour relations with Israel. When Washington passed word that it hoped the Israeli government would remain intact, Labor leaders denounced the bid as a "gross interference in Israel's internal affairs." When the Bush Administration described as "senseless and tragic" a Palestinian attack on % an Israeli bus two weeks ago that resulted in 14 deaths, Israeli officials were furious that the U.S. had not denounced the act as terrorism. And when a U.S. official implied that Israel and the P.L.O., using American intermediaries, had engaged in secret contacts, Labor and Likud responded with a unified denial. This week a State Department delegation had been scheduled to travel to Israel in hopes of preserving the government and the peace plan, but the trip was scrubbed after U.S. officials received assurances that the Israelis would resolve the two difficult issues among themselves.