ISRAEL’S Government was in crisis yesterday after a religious party in the ruling coalition threatened to quit unless an edict allowing the prosecution of shopkeepers who break the Jewish Sabbath was restored.

Ariel Sharon, who was re-elected as Prime Minister only two months ago, is to hold urgent ministerial talks tomorrow to try to overcome the highly sensitive problem. If it is not resolved, the National Religious Party (NRP) looks likely to leave the coalition, just as a “road map” to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is being formulated.

Such a move would leave Mr Sharon’s Government with a vulnerable majority of only two in the 120-seat Knesset. Furthermore, a walkout by the NRP would produce an Israeli ruling coalition without an Orthodox constituent for the first time since the foundation of the Israeli State in 1948.

Political observers regarded the situation as serious. They recalled 1976, when Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister at the time, took delivery of new American fighter jets in a ceremony that continued into the Sabbath — which lasts from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday.

In the row that followed the NRP abstained in a vote of no-confidence tabled by another religious party, prompting Mr Rabin to dissolve the Government and call an election.

Yesterday Ephraim Eitam, the NRP leader who is Housing Minister in Mr Sharon’s administration, told Israeli Army Radio that the Sabbath was of crucial national and Jewish value. Referring to the decision to halt the work of the Sabbath inspectors who enforce the ban, which is based on the biblical Jewish law prohibiting work on the Sabbath, Mr Eitam said: “This matter is not open to any compromise. We will not be a part of any government that desecrates the Sabbath.”

In recent years, Shlomo Benizri, of Shas, another religious party, who served as Labour Minister, intensified the activity of the inspectors against the growing number of businesses that employed Jews at the weekend. In 2000 inspectors — often likened by their secular critics to Saudi Arabia’s Muslim religious police — made 1,769 calls to shops, imposed 500 fines and filed 67 charge sheets. Critics claimed that this activity came at the expense of enforcing other employment legislation.

The latest row flared after Ehud Olmert, the Minister of Trade and Industry, halted the work of the religious inspectors from this weekend. The NRP said that his move was “reckless, irresponsible and lacking in judgment”. Zevulun Orlev, the Social Affairs Minister, declared: “The NRP cannot put up with such a blatant violation of the coalition agreement, which requires the upholding of the status quo.”

Mr Eitam, a former general often derided as an “ayatollah” by secular Israeli Jews who resent his political clout, has won support for his stance from Israel’s Supreme Court. It rejected an appeal by the owner of a Tel Aviv hardware shop who had been fined by Sabbath inspectors for opening on Saturday. “The day of rest for workers has a welfare and social aim. It is a national value no less than a religious one,” Judge Dalia Domer said.

Israeli governments have avoided tinkering with the delicate balance between the religious and the secular, but attitudes changed after the meteoric rise in elections this year of the ultra-secular Shinui party, which gained 15 seats, becoming the Knesset’s third-biggest grouping.

Yesterday Yosef Paritzky, of Shinui, said that the move to suspend the inspections had been “co-ordinated” with his party, but denied that it constituted an attack on the “status quo”.

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