Rabin Wins Time to Repair Split in Israeli Coalition : Mideast: Interior minister from religious party delays resignation. Prime minister seeks a compromise.

JERUSALEM â€”  Unable to work out a compromise between the leftist and religious parties in his fragile coalition government, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin secured a week’s delay Tuesday in the resignation of his interior minister, gaining time to bridge the Cabinet’s deep divisions.

Minutes before his resignation was to take effect, Interior Minister Arye Deri withdrew it at an emergency Cabinet meeting in a deal under which he and Shulamit Aloni, the controversial education minister, temporarily gave up their portfolios to provide Rabin time to resolve the feud between them.

Deri, leader of the ultra-religious Shas Party, has demanded Aloni’s replacement as education minister, accusing her of carrying her secularism to the point of sacrilege in failing to observe Jewish laws and teachings.

Aloni, who has long contended that the religious parties exercise too much control over Israeli lives, has refused to step down without receiving another major Cabinet post and denounced Deri’s demands as political blackmail.

Deri’s resignation, originally submitted Sunday, would mean the departure of the ultra-religious Shas Party from Rabin’s 10-month-old coalition, leaving the prime minister without the wide political backing he needs to make substantive compromises in the Middle East peace talks.

Rabin used this prospect to press Aloni’s leftist Meretz Party for a compromise Tuesday, warning that the continuing feud with Shas imperiled the Arab-Israeli negotiations, which are a priority for Meretz.

But the compromise left the government so weakened, sapped of virtually all of its political energy and focused almost exclusively on its own cohesion, that the peace talks seemed likely to stall, at least in the short term.

“I don’t like this,� Aloni said after the deal was struck. “I think it’s awful, both for the reasons and in the way it has been done. But I want it to be clear that this is a democratic state . . . and the struggle today is not just for the education portfolio and not about Shulamit Aloni.

“We are in the middle of a very serious struggle over the essence of the state of Israel as a democratic state. . . . “

Environment Minister Yossi Sarid, also from Meretz, justified the deal in terms that probably motivated most of those involved in the three days of negotiations on the government’s future.

“It’s very easy to pull a government apart, very difficult to put one together later,� he said. “They want another seven days to save this government? Since I have no other government, no other coalition, no other partners and since we are standing at the dawn of a new era I hope will be the era of peace in the Middle East . . . I decided give it another chance.�

Meretz had agreed to the week’s reprieve, Sarid said, after Rabin had pledged that any solution would have to be acceptable to it.

Deri said that, ultimately, Shas would only agree to a solution that shifted the Education Ministry to Rabin’s Labor Party and moved Aloni to a ministry far removed from the concerns of the strictly observant Haredi Orthodox community from which Shas gets much of its support.

Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud Party, mocked Rabin’s efforts to hold together the coalition and said the only real solution is new parliamentary elections.

Rabin opened negotiations Tuesday evening with another religious party, United Torah Judaism, in the hope that it could be brought into the coalition and ease the government’s dependence on Shas.

He also warned his Labor Party that it should prepare for a period of minority government when it and Meretz would constitute the Cabinet alone. Labor has 44 seats in the 120-member Knesset, Meretz 12 and Shas 6; it can also count on five votes from the Arab and pro-Communist parties.