Israel's disputatious Avigdor LiebermanCan the coalition hold together?

AFTER a year in office, Israel's right-wing-cum-religious coalition is feeling an ominous tremor of internal discord. The issue, the bane of so many past coalition governments, is state and synagogue. A bill easing conversion to Judaism, championed by the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and his ex-Soviet immigrant party, Yisrael Beitenu, has run into furious resistance from the ultra-Orthodox party, the United Torah Judaism (UTJ), a coalition partner.

“When I die, I'll go straight to heaven just for having pushed through this bill,” says David Rotem, chairman of parliament's law committee and a member of Yisrael Beitenu (meaning “Israel is our home”). “I don't know where opponents of the bill will go.” Ultra-Orthodox members, apparently confident of their place in heaven, protested. A member of the Labour party, another coalition partner, said that if the ultra-Orthodox were in heaven he would rather not go there.

Can these disparate factions stay together on earth for another three years? For many Israelis, the issue touches their personal lives and their sense of identity. Of the 1m-plus immigrants from the former Soviet Union who have settled in Israel in the past two decades, some 300,000 are considered gentile by the Orthodox rabbinate, because, under the Orthodox interpretation, Jewishness is transmitted only through mothers. As a result, they cannot marry in Israel, where the only form of marriage is religious. And they cannot generally be buried in Jewish cemeteries, even if they die in army service. Those who seek to convert are required by the rabbinical courts to adopt an Orthodox lifestyle, which most of the immigrants, like most Jewish-born Israelis, are not prepared to do.

Yisrael Beitenu's bill would take conversion out of the exclusive control of the rabbinical courts and empower community rabbis around the country to convert people. The party's assumption is that pastoral clergymen would be more lenient and accommodating than the stern and remote rabbinical judges. For that reason, UTJ objects to the bill. Mr Lieberman claims he had the written support of Shas, the Sephardic-Orthodox party, another coalition partner. Shas, he says, welshed under pressure from UTJ.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is loth to lose any of his partners and has told lawyers to find a compromise. Mr Lieberman says he wants a result before Israel's parliament adjourns for its spring recess. In any event, other problems could remove him from the government. Corruption charges, which he says are politically motivated, persist. And he is often sidelined as foreign minister. For one thing, his commitment to a two-state solution has always been even more questionable than Mr Netanyahu's.