Word: meire
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...hasn't been such a good evening," said Prime Minister Golda Meir ruefully, as she arrived for a meeting with Israel's President Ephraim Katzir - beating the legal deadline for forming a new government by only 45 minutes. Mrs. Meir's remark was something of an understatement. Despite almost two months of intense negotiations, she had been unable to form a broad-based coalition and was forced to announce the first minority government in Israel's history. Her Labor Party, which won 51 seats in the election last December, along with two allied splinter groups will...
...hurried had Mrs. Meir's last-minute deliberations been that she was not able to say, even at that eleventh hour, who would be in or out of her new Cabinet. Angry at criticism within the Labor Party of his handling of the Yom Kippur War, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had pulled an Achilles-like withdrawal and announced that he would not serve in the next Cabinet "under existing conditions" - meaning, presumably, that he would pout on the sidelines until the critics said that they were sorry. "I have asked him, I am asking him, and I will...
...time when Israel needs a broad consensus government to carry out the delicate peace talks in Geneva, Labor's traditional ally, the National Religious Party (ten Knesset seats), refused to join Mrs. Meir because of a theological dispute over the definition of who is a Jew. The Religious Party demanded that Labor support a change in the Law of Return* under which Israel would refuse to recognize conversions to Judaism that had not followed Orthodox rites, an action that would bring into question the religious and legal status of many Israelis...
...Meir, whose party is both secular and socialist, would agree only to set up a committee to study the issue. But she promised to keep three Cabinet seats open - just in case the N.R.P. comes around to her view and gives her the majority she needs to govern effectively. Even if the Religious Party stays out, it will probably vote along with Labor on most major issues...
Secret Location. Not all the votes in the Knesset, however, could solve Mrs. Meir's basic problems - nor those of Israel, which is now going through its greatest crisis of confidence since it gained independence. No matter what the final outcome on the battlefields of October, most Israelis feel that they lost the political and diplomatic war, and they are looking for someone to blame. The Prime Minister herself has suffered a Nixonesque drop in the public opinion polls - from 65% support before the war to 21% today. Dayan, the hero of the 1967 war, is now constantly derided...