Israel’s Rabin Scolds Official for Call to Give Up Golan : Politics: To retain parliamentary majority, prime minister stops short of firing education minister.

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, trying to hold his coalition government together, on Sunday chastised his leftist education minister for advocating the full return of the occupied Golan Heights to Syria and for equally controversial comments on religious issues.

But Rabin stopped short of dismissing Shulamit Aloni in order to retain the support of her Citizens Rights Movement and the other parties in Meretz, a leftist bloc that helps give the Labor-led government its working majority in the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament.

“I made it clear that we cannot continue to maintain the present coalition if the phenomenon of Shulamit Aloni’s statements continues,” Rabin said after a meeting with Meretz leaders.

“The problem is not with Meretz nor with the (other) ministers of Meretz, but with the comments of Shulamit Aloni on religious matters and politics.”

Although Rabin depends on Meretz for 12 of his coalition’s 62 seats in the 120-member Knesset, he also needs the six seats of Shas, a religious party that has objected to Aloni’s efforts to de-emphasize religion in reforming the country’s schools and has warned it might quit the government as a result.

The Aloni controversy thus exposed both major fault lines in Israeli politics--Rabin’s “land for peace” approach to negotiations with the country’s Arab neighbors and the place of religion in the Jewish state. And it left questions on Rabin’s ability to win support for the compromises necessary in those peace negotiations.

“The basis of the coalition is very sensitive,” Meretz Chairman Yossi Sarid said after the meeting at Rabin’s office. “The prime minister urged us to take this into consideration and to express our opinions in a more cautious way. This crisis is over, I believe.

“This government is our government, and it is a very important government. This coalition is our coalition, and it is the most preferable coalition. We will take all the measures necessary to keep this coalition alive.”

Peace is Meretz’s top priority, Sarid continued, and it wants to remain in the coalition to promote it.

Aloni had appeared unrepentant on Friday as the crisis mounted, declaring, “I am a woman who arouses controversy.” But on Sunday, she uncharacteristically let Sarid do the talking.

Aloni had angered Rabin by saying that the Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, still belonged to Syria under international law despite Israeli action to annex them and then adding that Rabin was prepared to return them in full in a peace settlement.

“I was shocked to read in the papers that I would give back the whole Golan Heights,” said Rabin, who wants to keep Israel’s position forthcoming but fuzzy in the current negotiations with Syria. “That’s total nonsense. I by no means authorized this, nor had she any basis to say it.”

Yaacov Tsur, the agriculture minister and a Rabin confidant, said the Aloni statement during the most recent round of Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations had undermined Jerusalem’s position and “caused great harm.”

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Aloni had already come under fire from religious parties for suggestions that the government use the text of a memorial prayer that omits the name of God, that Israeli schools teach evolution as scientifically verified and that religious studies be reduced in reforming the country’s educational system.

Interior Minister Arye Deri, who represents Shas in the Cabinet, warned that Aloni’s comments would soon drive his party out of the coalition. “Every day, she offends us,” Deri said last week. “Rabin should fire her.”

The fight between Aloni, a longtime civil rights advocate, and Israel’s religious parties is an old one and reflects entirely different visions of the Jewish state. Aloni walked out of an earlier Rabin Cabinet, in 1974, when he brought the National Religious Party into his governing coalition with a series of compromises she felt ignored the country’s real problems.

Housing Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said after Rabin’s meeting with the Meretz leader that the controversy is far from over and predicted that Aloni’s stance on religious issues could still break up the present coalition and perhaps bring down the government.

“Shulamit Aloni, in fact, is doing very well as a minister, but she’s creating a hell of a lot of trouble politically,” Ben-Eliezer said. “She is closing every room for broadening this coalition (through the participation of other religious parties), and by continuing her provocative approach she is opening the door for Shas to leave.”

Shas, which draws much of its support from religious Sephardic immigrants from North Africa and other Arab countries, is under increasing pressure, both from its backers and from other religious parties, to justify its continued participation in the coalition.

Rabin, meanwhile, cast doubt Sunday on previous government pledges to end the legal prohibition on contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization; he said he feared this would encourage the United States to resume formal talks with the PLO, thus complicating Arab-Israeli negotiations.