Israel’s Labour Party hauled itself back into the peace camp this week by electing a dovish former army general to lead it in the 2003 general election.
An exit poll gave Amram Mitzna, the mayor of the coastal city of Haifa, 57% of the vote, compared to 35% for the current Labour Party leader Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. Knesset member Haim Ramon was a distant third with 8%.
His victory offers voters a stark choice between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s belief in military control as the best means of assuring Israel’s security and the view that peace will come only by ending the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Mitzna has pledged to immediately remove the highly contentious Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and to dismantle most, but not all, of those on the West Bank.
To the fury of many of the right, he said that as prime minister he would begin unconditional negotiations with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to establish an independent Palestine.
His most radical proposal is to unilaterally pull the Israeli army out of the West Bank and leave the Palestinians to govern themselves if talks fail by the end of his first year in office.
”We will try to separate ourselves from the Palestinians by agreement. If that fails, we go to a unilateral approach,” he said.
While Sharon and the right insist that they will not talk to Arafat under any circumstances — and only to other members of the Palestinian leadership once the terrorist attacks stop — Mitzna says he will not lay down any preconditions to talks.
”We will talk as if there is no terrorism and we will fight terrorism as if there are no negotiations. To say there can be no negotiations while there is terrorism is to give the right of veto to extremists. That’s stupid,” he said.
Mitzna is also in a minority among Israelis in questioning the sincerity of previous peace offers to the Palestinians. As things stand, he is unlikely to be able to put his policies into practice.
An election today would probably see Sharon’s Likud Party snap up a third more seats in the Knesset while Labour will be hard pressed to hang on to what it already has. Even half of all Labour members do not believe their party can win the general election on January 28. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002