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Headline: Israel's old left finds a new voice
Byline: Ben Lynfield Special to The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 08/28/2002
(TEL AVIV)With his reserved manner, soporific speaking style, and lack of
experience in national affairs, Amram Mitzna seems like an unlikely
person to charge up Israeli politics.
But analysts say the rapid rise of the tall, angular mayor of Haifa to
the status of prime ministerial hopeful stems largely from the content
of his positions: He has staked out the only clear alternative to the
hard-line policies of the government since Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon's election a year and a half ago.
"It is obvious that by force alone, nothing can be solved," Mr. Mitzna
told a group of middle-aged and elderly left-wingers in Tel Aviv last
Friday.
Mitzna, a retired general, wears a salt-and-pepper beard that dates
back to the eve of the 1967 war, when, he says, he and army buddies
resolved not to shave until there was peace. With the Palestinian
uprising about to enter its third year, there seems scant prospect it
will come off any time soon.
"Over the last year, hundreds of citizens and soldiers were killed in
Israel despite the fact that we have been using against the terror all
of our strength, with the best army commanders, and led by a man who
termed himself 'Mr. Security,' " he said.
Mitzna declined to take questions from the press, instead fielding
softballs from the sympathetic group that gathers every Friday to
commemorate assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, his patron in
the army and later in politics. He said that Rabin's decision to sign
the Oslo agreement was "not a mistake, it was right to try to end the
cycle of hostility. But the process was derailed after Yitzhak's
murder."
As he shook hands with his listeners afterwards, an accordion was
playing the Hebrew song "See How Good It Will be Next Year."
Hope for the doves?
Mitzna's candidacy, declared two weeks ago, offers a test of whether
the dovish agenda can be revived in today's Israel, where the
prevailing view, articulated repeatedly by the government, is that
there is no one to negotiate with on the Palestinian side.
Mitzna says that if elected, he would immediately open talks with the
Palestinian Authority, which the government has shunned on the grounds
that this would reward terrorism and that no diplomacy is possible
while Yasser Arafat remains the Palestinian leader.
"I have no blind faith in the Palestinians, but let us speak to one
another honestly, let us look at each other in the eyes, let us give it
one more chance, a real chance," he says. If negotiations fail, he
says, Israel will establish an eastern security border unilaterally,
withdrawing from most of the West Bank.
The mayor is unabashedly clear that under an agreement or in the event
of a unilateral delineation of Israel's eastern border, the 35-year-old
Jewish settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories will have to
come to an end. "The friction with the Palestinians is a weight
dragging us into the abyss," he says. "We must break free of it. We
must tell the 200,000 people who settled in the territories as part of
a national mission that the mission today is to return home."
'A new face'
Mitzna attended a military academy for high school and was drafted into
the army in 1963. There he spent three decades and fought in three
wars, in addition to being the general in charge of the West Bank at
the outbreak of the first intifada, when he was known among
Palestinians for tough tactics including house demolitions and
expulsions. Mitzna says that the post led him to the conclusion that
force alone would not solve the conflict and that occupying Palestinian
land was harming Israel's values.
Earlier, as a brigadier-general in 1982, he commanded the eastern front
in Israel's Lebanon invasion but after the Sabra and Shatilla massacre
declared he was resigning from the army to protest the handling of the
war by Mr. Sharon, then the defense minister. The chief of staff at the
time, Rafael Eitan, dissuaded him from doing so.
"There are some people, particularly in the media, who favor a more
dovish approach by the Labor Party, who long for a sharper ideological
distinction between Labor and Likud," says Uzi Benziman, a columnist
for Ha'aretz.
The current Labor defense minister and Mitzna's rival for party
leadership, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, "is perceived as following what
Sharon says."
"Mitzna is a new face who still did not disappoint us. It seems that
people are looking to him as a messiah who will solve our problems,"
adds Mr. Benziman.
Polls published Friday in Israel's Yediot Ahronot newspaper show Mitzna
with 62 percent support compared to 32 percent for the current Labor
leader, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.
Sharon remains by far the most popular leader, and polls say he would
defeat Mitzna by 50 percent to 30 percent. Former Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, another Likud party hopeful, would also defeat
Mitzna, with 46 percent to 35 percent.
If he bests Ben-Eliezer in a November primary, Mitzna's chances of
becoming prime minister may hinge on the degree of tranquility at the
time of the election, which will be held in October 2003 at the latest.
Whether there are terrorist attacks, peace initiatives, or a major US
military action in Iraq could all influence the contest, analysts say.
"Mitzna is definitely worth keeping an eye on," says Joseph Alpher,
former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.
Not everyone agrees. One commentator, Uri Orbach, wrote in Yediot
Ahronot last week that Mitzna, who raised his children on Kibbutz Ein
Gev in northern Israel, is an anachronism, a man who embodies the hopes
of the old, left-wing Ashkenazi (European-Jewish) establishment that
once controlled the country. "He is the darling son of those people who
feel that the country and Labor party have been taken away from them."
"But who from among those who voted for Sharon would support a crazed
dove like him for prime minister?" Orbach asked.
The Israeli-Arab factor
One advantage Mitzna might have is his ability to enlist the support of
Israel's Arab citizens, who make up 20 percent of the population. In
the last elections, Arab voters stayed away in droves to protest Prime
Minister Ehud Barak's tough policies against the intifada and the
shooting of 13 Arab demonstrators by police.
Thanks in part to Mitzna, Jewish-Arab relations in Haifa, which has a
10 percent Arab minority, have remained civil throughout the intifada,
according to Shmuel Gelbhardt, an opposition city councilor from the
environmentalist Green Party.
"He has sympathy and empathy for the Arab minority, but he has only
enmity for the environmentalists," Gelbhardt says. Gelbhardt accuses
Mitzna of monopolizing decisionmaking and of turning the city council
into a "rubber stamp."
But he predicts the mayor would make a good national leader. "Security
is his strong point and in government there would be more checks and
balances," he says.
(c) Copyright 2002 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
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