Mrs. Meir's House Divided

"It 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 have only 58 seats in the 120-member Knesset.

So 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 ask him to serve in the new Cabinet," a weary Meir told reporters. "And I hope he will do so."

At a 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.

Mrs. 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 for the disastrous early setbacks of 1973. Indeed, one popular hero of the Yom Kippur War, Reserve Captain Motti Ashkenazi, 33, who commanded the only fortification on the Bar-Lev Line that did not fall to the Egyptians, last week led 4,000 anti-Dayan pickets in front of Mrs. Meir's Jerusalem office. GO DOWN MOSES (DAYAN)! read some of the placards.

One reason for the present Israeli malaise is financial. The cost of the war -- an estimated $10 billion -- has staggered the country's economy. The involuntary war "loan" deducted from Israeli salaries has been raised to 14% of income -- on top of steep ordinary income tax rates -- even as government subsidies of food staples have been slashed. As a result, the cost of such items as bread, butter and milk has risen anywhere from 30% to 70%, while the average bus fare has gone up 50% and the price of a telephone call 33%.

At the same time, manpower shortages caused by the mobilization have brought a drastic decline in public services. Mail deliveries have slowed; telephone service, disrupted by unusually heavy winter rains, is erratic. Most people have found it impossible even to get the telephone repair number to answer.

Newspapers have carried stories of customers searching for the "secret" location of the utility's repair headquarters.

Juvenile crime in December was up 37% over the year before, partly because of the economic squeeze. Israel lately has been plagued by a series of strikes and strike threats. Last week the Tel Aviv daily Ma'ariv discovered that the number of Israelis applying to emigrate to Canada in January had doubled over the year before.

Some of the feeling of malaise can be understood in light of the euphoria that followed the 1967 war. "Expectations were raised so rapidly," says Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist at Hebrew University, "that even a small setback in the standard of living creates a huge psychological adjustment."

"The state has gone through a devaluation," writes Columnist Joel Marcus in the daily Ha'aretz, "a devaluation in leadership ability, devaluation in spirit, in values, in morale, in faith and self-confidence." Traditionally respected as the savior of the nation, even the army has come under attack for incompetence. Following a hue and cry about the lack of cold-weather gear for soldiers on the frosty Golan Heights, civilian volunteers and even tourists went up to the front to distribute American parkas, long underwear and woolen socks. The government is understandably apprehensive about the upcoming report of a blue-ribbon commission investigating the army's shortcomings.

Aging Leaders. Much of Israel's uneasiness seems to be the result of a basic lack of confidence in the country's tired, aging leadership. Beset by painful bouts of shingles (a virus infection of the nervous system) and an inflammation of the eyelids, Prime Minister Meir, now 75, has been largely out of sight for weeks at perhaps the most critical time in her political career. Though her new government is stable enough in the short run, new elections will probably have to be called before the term of the current parliament expires in 1977. Many Israelis hope that by that time a new generation of leaders will have emerged. "If someone in 1948 had told us that in 1974 public discussion would center around the same people we had then," says Amnon Rubinstein, the dean of Tel Aviv Law School, "we'd have been convinced that he needed to be hospitalized."

* Which states that any Jew is automatically eligible for Israeli citizenship.

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