Israeli Mayor Seeks the Helm of Labor Party

With a chance that national elections could be held as soon as January, the popular mayor of one of Israel’s few mixed Jewish-Arab cities announced his candidacy Tuesday for leadership of the Labor Party, a position that would put him in the running for prime minister.

The move by Haifa Mayor Amram Mitzna sent a buzz of excitement through Israel’s moribund left and peace camp. Many regard him as the only chance to save the once-powerful Labor Party from extinction. For a change, Israelis were consumed Tuesday by election politics, rather than the usual, daily menu of war and recession.

Mitzna, two-term mayor of Israel’s third-largest city, is the classic hybrid that this nation produces for its political echelons: a former general and military hero who is now a left-leaning dove.

Polls over the weekend gave this newcomer to national politics a huge lead over the current chairman of the Labor Party, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who is defense minister in the coalition government. Key members of the Labor Party were rushing to Mitzna’s side, and an editorial cartoon Tuesday portrayed him as a huge, bow-wrapped gift.

But some Israelis wondered whether Mitzna would be another flash-in-the-pan politician and noted that the enthusiasm he is generating speaks at least partially to the desperate plight of both the Labor Party and Israel as a whole.

Mitzna, 57, quickly staked out positions Tuesday that distinguish him from both Ben-Eliezer and right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an old foe.

While pledging to fight terrorism “with all means available,” Mitzna called for immediate, unconditional negotiations with the Palestinians--even if that means talking to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. It’s the opposite of Sharon’s policy and the one espoused by President Bush.

“I will call the Palestinians to come back to the negotiation table, and we will talk to the one that will be elected by the Palestinians,” Mitzna said in English at a news conference at Labor Party headquarters in Tel Aviv.

The current strategy, he said, “of force, and force and more force” will not work to restore security to Israelis or bring peace--a lesson he says he learned as head of the army’s central command during the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And if negotiations don’t work, he said, Israel must separate itself unilaterally from the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, build a wall between the two peoples and evacuate most Jewish settlements on the Palestinian side of the line.

For all the fanfare surrounding Mitzna, many here were remembering the brilliant but brief careers of other recent candidates--men who seemed like political saviors, only to fare miserably when truly tested on the campaign trail or in office. One, Ehud Barak, ousted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party in a landslide in 1999--only to fall to Sharon, also of Likud, by an even greater margin a scant 21 months later.

“Mitzna, today’s shining star, the galloping knight on a white horse, is likely to be a former star a few months down the line,” Nahum Barnea, Israel’s dean of political commentators, wrote Tuesday on the front page of the top-selling newspaper Yediot Aharonot.

“The media will grow tired of him and will become grouchier. Everything here fades in the summer sun--even fresh candidates for prime minister.”

One difference with Mitzna, analysts noted, is that unlike several shooting-star candidates, he is not attempting to form his own party but rather remain within the Labor structure. That could cut both ways, because Ben-Eliezer commands the loyalty of much of the party machinery. Labor members will vote for a party leader in balloting this year.

Labor has never recovered from Barak’s landslide loss to Sharon in February 2001. The party’s activists have been tainted by association with a peace process that included Arafat and was launched by the 1993 Oslo accords--and is discredited in the eyes of Israeli public opinion, currently dominated by center-right views. And on the left, Labor supporters have been dismayed that the party has stayed in a government responsible for launching massive military offensives against the Palestinians without pursuing political solutions.

While support for Likud continues to grow, surveys show Labor at its lowest point in its long history, according to Israeli pollster Rafi Smith. The interest in Mitzna, Smith said, is a direct product of generalized disappointment.

“There’s a vacuum on the left, and they need a clean candidate,” said Shmuel Sandler, a political scientist at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University. “He’s probably the best candidate at this point that they can recruit, but I don’t know if he can win. They’re basically looking for damage control.”

Sharon this week threatened to call snap elections if Labor and other major political parties in his coalition government make good on their threat to vote against the 2003 budget, which cuts deep into social welfare programs and defense while preserving subsidies for Jewish settlers. The vote is to come before parliament in October.

Holding elections in January--one of the possibilities raised by Sharon’s aides--would move the vote 10 months ahead of schedule. Although the budget dispute serves as a good pretext, early elections would enable Sharon, whose own poll rankings have started to slip, to stave off the only rival he is really concerned about, Netanyahu.

The former prime minister has been biding his time, preparing to make a comeback by cultivating an increasingly angry, hard-right following.

For Mitzna to stand a chance in Israel’s cutthroat electoral politics, analysts said, he will have to portray himself as a fresh alternative who has also efficiently run a major city. Haifa has about 270,000 residents, 12% of whom are Arab.