THE ISRAELI Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, was working against the clock last night to get his key ministers to approve a shuffle of his fractured cabinet.
Mr Netanyahu is hoping to announce in the Knesset today that he is appointing Mr Ariel Sharon, the highly controversial former defence minister, as Finance Minister. He would succeed Mr Dan Meridor, who resigned this month saying he, had lost all faith in the Prime Minister.
However the Foreign Minister, Mr David Levy, and the Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, are strongly opposing Mr Sharon's appointment to the finance portfolio and to the small "kitchen cabinet" overseeing peace efforts with the Palestinians.
Mr Levy, who ironically helped secure a cabinet position for Mr Sharon when the government was formed last year, yesterday refused to meet Mr Netanyahu to discuss Mr Sharon's promotion.
If the appointment does go through today, it will represent a remarkable comeback for a man whose prospects of further senior office appeared to have been destroyed by the Lebanon war.
A 1983 judicial commission of inquiry found that the then defence minister had been "remiss in his duties" in failing to prevent the slaughter, by Christian Phalange troops the previous year, of hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese Muslims in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.
Mr Sharon has since established himself as the champion of the Israeli right wing in general, and the settlers in particular, and has continually referred to Mr Yasser Arafat as a "war criminal".
It is that uncompromising position on the Palestinians, his commitment to settlement expansion, and his "bull in a china shop" reputation, that have prompted Mr Levy and Mr Mordechai to oppose his appointment, and caused barely concealed horror in international diplomatic ranks.
In an apparent bid to disarm his critics, Mr Sharon recently met Mr Arafat's deputy, Mr Abu Mazen - his first talks with a senior Palestinian Authority official. However, Palestinian leaks suggested that Mr Sharon was as uncompromising as ever in discussing the parameters of possible peace accords.
Mr Netanyahu desperately needs to complete his reshuffle in order to restore some stability to his badly driven coalition. A successful Knesset announcement today might also deflect attention from a sensational TV interview recently given by his wife Sara.
The interview was screened last night. But it is the outbursts that were excised from the broadcast, in which Ms Netanyahu criticises the country's only, female minister, Ms Limor Livnat, and Ms Sonia Peres, wife of the former prime minister, Mr Shimon Peres, that have been making headlines.
In this footage, cut because it was filmed after Ms Netanyahu bad asked that the cameras stop rolling, she reportedly describes Ms Peres as "an uneducated woman, who washes dishes and plays cards."
She says that Ms Livnat, whom she has reportedly accused of a romantic interest in her husband, "would not have been appointed" to the cabinet if she had had any say in the matter.