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5763: Articles posted from September 2002-September 2003
Get the real situation in Israel every day.
Mitzna's Mitzva
By Robert Rosenberg
August 18, 202
Haifa Mayor Amram Mitzna's announcement that he is running for prime minister -- his first obstacle is beating Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the defense minister, in a Labor Party primary race for party chairman slated for November -- was the first bit of good news in Israeli politics in nearly two years, despite the cynicism exuded by Israeli political reporters, who pride themselves on a sycophantic lack of imagination that regards everything unusual as impossible.
Mitzna has been compared to Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the former army chief of staff who appeared as an overnight savior in the polls in the dark days of Bibi Netanyahu's premiership, but who quickly revealed that like most generals who go directly into politics, he didn't understand that handing down an order in civilian life is not the same as getting something done, and who obviously did not have the stomach for the down and dirty politics that makes a democracy work. He has also been compared to Ehud Barak, another failed general turned politician, who did manage to get elected, and proved to be decisive -- though at almost every turn he made the wrong decision.
Those two comparisons represent the shallowness of political analysis in Israel, where the underlying principal is nothing ever changes, politicians aren't meant to have ideas, only personal ambition, and stereotyping, being the easy way to explain things, is about as far as a political reporter goes in the effort to characterize someone.
So, some facts: Mitzna was a young brigadier heading the army staff college when he announced he could not support then-defense minster Ariel Sharon's 1982 campaign in Lebanon. Under pressure from then-chief of staff Rafael Eitan, Mitzna remained in the army, and ended up as military commander of the West Bank during the first intifada, which began at the end of 1986. He may have had a reputation as a 'dovish' general because of his opposition to the Lebanon War, but in the West Bank, during those years of intifada, he used all the well-known Israeli tactics to try to put down the unrest: there were house demolitions, expulsions, shootings at rioters, and more. He stayed on the job until 1992, just before the Oslo agreements put an end to the intifada, and then left the army. He was not a success, if success means putting an end to the civil unrest and terrorism. But he left the army with a profound understanding that military force was not going to solve the problem in the territories, a message he drove home to Yitzhak Rabin.
It was Rabin, then newly re-elected as prime minister after failing his first time around in the mid-1970s (for many of the same reasons that Shahak failed to get elected and Barak failed
to live up to the promise of his indisputable brilliance -- as a general he believed that ordering something done meant it would be done, which just isn't how it works in a civil democracy) who decided Mitzna should run for mayor of Haifa against the long-time Labor Party machine in that port city.
It was a radical idea at the time for an ex-general to actually run for office, rather than just get it handed to him on a platter (only Shlomo "Chich" Lahat did it in Tel Aviv, but he was a genuine war hero from the Yom Kippur War and beat colorless Labor Party back-room pol turned mayor Yehoshua Rabinowtiz), and even more revolutionary was that Mitzna would challenge the Tamany Hall type politicians of Rabin's own Labor Party in Haifa.
Mitzna won, largely because then-mayor Aryeh Gorel was so clearly past his prime, still believing in machine politics even though the law had been changed for mayoral candidates to run directly for office instead of at the head of a party list. Mitzna combined quiet charisma, readiness to work, his ability to put together a loyal staff of professionals, and his stubborn insistence that once committed he would get the job done, to beat the pants off Gorel.
And once elected, Mitzna brought some of what the army teaches best, to city hall: staff work, responsibility to meet commitments, and a powerful work ethic that also might have come from his kibbutz background. Since that first election in the early 1990s, he's been re-elected, with even larger majorities.
Over the decade he's reduced the city's deficit to an insignificant NIS 13 million this year (making it pretty much the only city in Israel with a balanced budget), increased city social services to the public, kept on good terms with the secular, religious, new immigrants, and Arabs of the city; all by sticking to a number of clear principles:
Extraordinary attention to detail without losing sight of the overall picture (very similar to Rabin), which for Mitzna was bringing new development to the city;
a personal decency and modesty that is endearing in a country where every deputy mayor insists on a car, driver, four secretaries;
a stubborn refusal to become a backslapper (which usually portends a back-stabber) but at the same time a politician with compassion for people and their problems.
Perhaps most important, while he is said to rarely, if ever, say 'I was wrong' he is always ready to learn.
This background is important to understand why Mitzna is not another general parachuting into politics, not another knight riding into town on a white horse promising salvation, like Shahak (who ran as soon as the mud started flying) or Barak, a martinet with his head in the right place but a peculiar cowardice when it came to making real change, like bringing Arabs into government, or standing up to the political extortionists, or for that matter, closing the deal with Assad over the Golan, and most famously, not understanding that presenting a generous offer to the Palestinians is not the same as making that offer tangible.
It is true that Mitzna's overnight popularity -- so far enough to beat Ben-Eliezer, say the polls, though not yet enough to lead Labor to beat a Likud candidate, whether Sharon or Netanyahu -- is a reflection of the party's disarray, which itself is largely the result of a leadership that decided to follow Sharon rather than come up with an alternative to him.
But it's precisely Mitzna's presentation of an alternative that is so appealing. And what is that alternative, but the simple, straightforward argument that talk, talk, talk is better than shoot, shoot, shoot.
He says bluntly and sincerely and with a straightforward honesty sorely lacking nowadays in Israeli politics, that the way to end the deadlock is to resume the dialogue with the Palestinians, and that it is not up to Israel to choose the partner. While the jingoistic mainstream has bought the proposition 'there's nobody to talk to' on the Palestinian side, Mitzna is saying that there is no way to know that since the Sharon government, from its inception, has not even tried, except for faux-talks doomed to go nowhere because Sharon refuses to allow any discussion of an agreement.
Mitzna says clearly that the settlements have to go. He says clearly that the Palestinians of East Jerusalem must be Palestinian and not fourth-class Israelis. He says clearly that racism cannot be part of Israeli policy and politics. He says clearly that he is an outsider to the inner workings of the Knesset -- and that it is an advantage because he is not beholden to the extortionists, and because he can see a forest where the politicians, by now, can only see the bark on their own trees.
Most importantly, Mitzna has reminded Israelis who have paid attention so far -- and as he advances against Ben-Eliezer, more Israelis will notice -- that there is a different kind of politician, despite all the cynical reporters, than the types we have grown used to. He may not win, but he's doing a mitzva for Israeli society by trying.
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