TEL AVIV, Israel, July 15 (UPI) -- A power failure briefly left the Knesset plenum in the dark Wednesday as did the political scene with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon planning talks to expand his coalition.
Sharon is "playing ... the Soviet tactic of smoke screens," Tel Aviv University political science professor Gideon Doron told United Press International.
After receiving the opposition Labor Party's formal consent to enter talks, Sharon Wednesday phoned three Knesset members of the small ultra-orthodox Torah Judaism faction and formally invited them, too, for coalition talks that should begin Sunday.
Next Thursday, July 22, he is to meet leaders of the Sepharadi orthodox Shas Party.
He thus opened several options to expand his coalition that now has no majority in the 120-seat legislature.
One option is to keep the centrist Shinui in his coalition and co-opt the main opposition party, Labor, headed by former Prime Minister Shimon Peres.
That is likely to provide him with the backing of more than 70 Knesset members in the 120-seat legislature, providing some of his own Likud Party members do not rebel.
So far Likud hard-liners have put up a strong resistance to such a coalition. Labor was the party behind the Oslo accords with the Palestinians -- something Likud hard-liners deeply resent -- and they fear Labor and Shinui would push for more excessive concessions.
Having the Labor Party in the government "is a danger to Israel's security and economic interests and therefore is must not be there," argued Minister without Portfolio Uzi Landau.
One of the strongest objectors is Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom who might lose his job to Peres if Labor joins the government.
The prime minister had an informal chat with journalists in the Knesset, Wednesday, in which he reportedly said, "It is important that the job (of foreign minister) go to a person capable of doing it, but this does not mean I have complaints about Silvan."
Wednesday night Shalom convened some 200 Likud central committee members in his home in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv and once again warned against establishing what he called a secular-leftist government that would lead towards the creation of a Palestinian state with the Jerusalem as its capital.
Doron noted that inside the Likud there is "quite a strong" alliance among Shalom, Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Limor Livnat.
Sharon has the backing of Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, but they do not have much clout among party members, Doron noted.
The invitation Sharon extended to Knesset Members Avraham Ravitz, Yaakov Litzman and Moshe Gafni of Torah Judaism opens several other options.
The one most talked about foresees a situation in which Shinui leaves the coalition while Labor and Torah Judaism enter it.
Ravitz was clearly eager to join the government and said his faction deserves two Cabinet portfolios.
For more than 50 years, his party shunned Cabinet seats so as not to share collective responsibility for actions it opposed, such as transgressions of religious laws. At the most, they were deputy ministers in ministries that lacked a full-time minister.
Ravitz told the Knesset TV Channel their joining would force Shinui out of the government and reverse the process of secularizing Israel that Shinui assiduously followed.
Shinui refuses to serve in the same government as the ultra religious parties "and I see a great achievement in the fact that they are about to leave," Ravitz said.
Labor is ready to serve in a government with orthodox parties. One of Labor's leaders, a former minister, Haim Ramon, Wednesday stressed, "One must not rule out ... the ultra-orthodox."
On the other hand Torah Judaism has not endorsed Sharon's plan for a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and from four settlements in the northern West Bank.
"We have to consult the Torah Sages," Ravitz said, though he seemed to personally support the plan.
He indicated his faction accepted last month's Cabinet decision to authorize preparations for the pullback, but the next stages in the process are still "virtual."
The Council of Torah Sages that sets that faction's policies is to be consulted "in a few more months," Ravitz said.
The next major decision regarding the separation plan is expected in March 2005 when preparations are to be completed and actual decisions on the withdrawal need to be taken.
Shinui's leader, Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, seemed troubled enough by the prospect that Labor and the ultra-orthodox would replace his party in the coalition to say: "If the Labor Party will sit with them, we will arrange an ass's (contemptible) burial for them. We'll take half their votes and double our strength."
Labor won 19 seats in the last elections and Shinui 15.
The religious Shas Party also wants to join the government. It needs government funding for its educational institutions that suffered a setback since it was left out in the cold.
When Sharon formed his government after the elections and did not include them, Shas's leader, former Sepharadi Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, said, "He who made him head of the government will make him head of the garbage cans."
In an interview on Channel 1 TV in March, Rabbi Ovadia said Sharon's separation plan did not conform to the views of the Torah but was done "to find favor with (U.S. President George) Bush and his friends."
Shas, however, has remained in previous governments that made concessions to the Palestinians. An independent academic specialist in Israeli politics, who asked not to be identified, said he believed Rabbi Ovadia would approve the separation plan.
The right-wingers in Shas have already joined the Likud and that party cannot exist outside the government, he said.
Theoretically Sharon could keep the present coalition, even at the cost of losing votes of confidence, as long as the opposition does not have 61 votes and an agreement on an alternative candidate.
The opposition does not yet have the required majority. The chances that Arabs, doves and super-hawks in the opposition would agree on an alternative Knesset member to replace Sharon seems remote.
Sharon Wednesday rejected continuing the status quo. He told reporters that the decisions ahead are such that he needs a stable and broad-based government. "We don't have it. I don't have the majority," he said.
