HAIFA, Israel — Amran Mitzna, the mayor of Haifa and a contender to lead Israel’s Labor Party, may be the most tone-deaf politician to enter Israeli politics in years. He recently told visiting American Jewish donors something they would rather not hear: If negotiations with the Palestinians fail, Israel should abandon the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Building Jewish settlements on what had been Arab land, pioneered by his own party after Israel’s victorious 1967 Six-Day War with the Arabs, “was a mistake and we have to confess it was a mistake. It is a dream that we cannot have today,” he said, while some in the audience groaned.
But if opinion polls are correct, the 57-year-old retired major general with the demeanor of a distracted college professor is likely to be the main opposition party’s champion against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s ruling right-wing Likud Bloc.
Victory in the Jan. 28 national poll is a long shot, to be sure. Polls show that a Likud led by Sharon or Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to win more seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.
But, for now, this soldier-turned-mayor who has never served in the Knesset is poised to win the left-of-center party leadership from another ex-general and veteran politician, former Defense Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer, who until recently served with Sharon as a junior partner in Israel’s National Unity Government.
Mitzna has been steadily climbing in popularity in the run-up to Tuesday’s Labor Party primary, articulating a vision that has been around for decades but sounds subversive to some after two years of bloody Palestinian-Israeli warfare.
Faced with the longest wave of terrorist attacks in Israeli history, he says, “We must fight terrorism like there are no negotiations. And we must negotiate like there is no terrorism.”
If that means talking to Yasser Arafat while rescue workers are scraping up the remains of suicide bombings, Mitzna says he’ll do it. If it means concluding that there is no hope for negotiations and that the only way to achieve “separation” is by removing Jewish settlers from the West Bank and Gaza, he says he’ll do that, too.