Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

JERUSALEM — Zevulun Hammer's death was another item of bad news for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Beside the undoubted personal sorrow — Hammer was a steady, reasonable ally who could be unstintingly counted upon — the National Religious Party leader's departure is potentially another destabilizing factor for the government.

The NRP — a major component of the coalition — could be thrown into a period of internal strife. With his slim majority, Netanyahu can ill-afford one more source of uncertainty and discord. Hammer had a calming influence on trouble-makers outside his party. Now the NRP may be left with no one as firmly in control and as widely accepted and respected.

Hammer's death was no surprise. He had been absent from active politics for many weeks. The last controversies in which his name was mentioned involved his illness. During the budget debate, Labor initially refused to pair off the bedridden Hammer with one of its Knesset members. A month before that there were quickly denied rumors of a battle for succession in the NRP, with Hammer already being written off. Some two weeks ago, his family forbade politicians from visiting him in the hospital, and Tuesday morning's Hatzofeh featured a front-page call to pray for his life. It was clear that the end was near.

No one in the NRP will openly admit it, but because the party was so well prepared for the loss of its leader, there is already more than a vague idea of what will happen after the mourning period is over. The accepted wisdom is that the party's No. 2, Transport Minister Yitzhak Levy, will be promoted to its chairman and will assume Hammer's education portfolio — the more senior of the two ministries accorded the NRP.

Knesset member Shaul Yahalom, the hyperactive chairman of the Knesset Law Committee, will then likely inherit Levy's portfolio. Yahalom and Levy are close, and Yahalom also enjoys the reputation of having been Hammer's personal protégé.

So far, all is well. The problems start with the fact neither Levy nor Yahalom is as universally accepted in the party as Hammer had been. Yahalom, for instance, could well be challenged on his way to the ministry. There is talk in the party about Knesset member Yigal Bibi and NRP Secretary-General Zevulun Orlev seeking the portfolio.

But the NRP was never a homogeneous party, and without an authoritative leader who can reconcile differences, malcontents may be emboldened and insurrections may occur. Though relatively calm in recent years, the party has a history of internecine battles as ferocious as any within the larger parties and may revert to its fragments.

Levy is regarded as ideologically less flexible than Hammer. Many in the NRP, however, note that he is outwardly as easy-going, mild mannered and unegotistical as Hammer was. The prediction among political observers, therefore, is that Levy could grow into the job of party leader and senior minister by learning Hammer's political sensitivity and his art of making peace inside the NRP. In other words, Levy will have to learn to compromise.

Whether Levy will exert the same influence outside his party as Hammer did, and whether, consequently, he could be as helpful to Netanyahu within the coalition, is another question.

As for Yahalom, he is considered as somewhat unpredictable.

He is shriller and decidedly more confrontational than either Hammer or Levy.

His anti-Shas zeal is said to have been responsible for starting the Bar-On Affair. Roni Bar-On's short-lived appointment last January as attorney general was surrounded by charges of influence-peddling, shaking the Netanyahu government.

Before the story broke on TV, Yahalom was quoted as charging that a Bar-On-for-Hebron deal may have been struck.

On the face of it, a Levy-Yahalom NRP Cabinet contingent will be more hawkish than the Hammer-Levy combination, but Hammer was less dovish than his style and manners implied, and Yahalom may be less extreme than his style suggests.