Israeli leaders reach pact on coalition
JERUSALEM – A new Israeli government is set to take office Thursday after acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wraps up coalition agreements giving his centrist Kadima Party and its partners a majority in parliament.
After three weeks of negotiations, a final deal was reached late Sunday with the religious Shas Party, giving Olmert’s coalition control of 67 seats in the 120-seat legislature. Olmert will present his Cabinet to parliament for approval Thursday, a parliamentary official said.
The Kadima-led government will include the left-leaning Labor Party as a senior partner, along with Shas and the Pensioners Party.
Kadima won 29 seats in the March 28 Israeli election and Labor came in second with 19 seats. Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party of Sephardic Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent, won 12 seats, and the Pensioners Party grabbed seven.
Olmert has pledged that if efforts to restart peace talks with the Palestinians fail, he would move to unilaterally set Israel’s borders by 2010, removing Israeli settlements from large parts of the West Bank while keeping the main settlement blocs there.
Shas, which opposes a unilateral pullback, did not promise to support Olmert’s plan, and analysts said the party could bolt the coalition if the plan is carried out, perhaps in a year or more. Olmert would then need the parliamentary support of leftist and Israeli Arab parties outside his coalition.
Assigning Cabinet portfolios Monday, Olmert named Tzipi Livni, a rising star in Israeli politics, as foreign minister and vice premier, making her the second-most senior figure in the government. Livni already has been serving as foreign minister in recent months.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who has ordered tough responses to Palestinian violence in recent years, will be replaced by Labor Party leader Amir Peretz, a former union leader without the strong military background of many of his predecessors in the defense post. Mofaz will serve as one of Olmert’s deputies and as transport minister.
Shimon Peres, a former prime minister and Israel’s elder statesman, will serve as a deputy to Olmert and minister of regional development. Abraham Hirschson, a close Olmert ally who is currently tourism minister, was named finance minister.
In other developments Monday, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian woman and wounded two of her daughters during a raid to arrest a militant hiding in an apartment house in the West Bank town of Tulkarem, the army and Palestinians said.