Recent polls showed 70 percent of all Israelis wanting their armed
forces to pull out of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet, 70 percent also said
they supported Likud leader Sharon's hard line. Commentators are calling
that these data "the 70 percent paradox."
To know whom the majority of Israelis prefer as their leaders, the national
elections on January 28 come none too soon. 120 seats in the Knesset,
Israel's parliament, will be assigned candidates from 29 listed parties
in proportion to each party's percentage of the total vote. 1.5 percent,
however, is the minimum required for a party to win a Knesset seat at
all. Traditionally, the gap between the political blocs on the right
and the left tends to be small. A switch of five or six seats away from
the right may be sufficient to bring the left to power. The most likely
leaders of the next coalition will be the leader of either Likud or
Labor: both former generals, Ariel Sharon and Amram Mitzna.
Mitzna, the "Yekke" (as Jews from Germany are disdainfully
called), won the Labor Party's primary against Ben-Eliezer, the defense
minister in Sharon's coalition who had tried to destroy the Palestinian
Authority. Mitzna promises to renew peace talks immediately, even if
he has to sit down with Yasir Arafat or Hamas. "Refusing to negotiate
as long as there is terrorism is stupid," Mishna explained. "This
gives the extremists the right to decide our agenda." "We
have to negotiate," he insists, "as though there was no terror,
and fight terror as though we were not negotiating."
Mitzna wants to withdraw the settlements from inside Palestinian territory,
end the exclusive reliance on military force against the Palestinian
resistance, and thus stop the struggle's devastating economic drain
on all involved. He has come out firmly against joining another grand
coalition with the clueless leaders of Likud, primarily Sharon and Netanyahu.
Compared to the 74-year old Sharon, the 58-year old Mitzna--successful
mayor of Haifa for the past nine years--represents a younger generation
of seasoned war veterans who believe that a more pragmatic, compromising
approach to the Palestinian expectations would help Israelis find the
security for which they fought since 1948. Mitzna is one of two generals
who resigned in protest to Sharon's ill-conceived campaign in Lebanon
and his involvement in the massacres of 2,000 Palestinians in the refugee
camps of Sabra and Shatila. Mitzna also opposed the destruction of Arafat's
compound in Ramallah: "It was wrong and ridiculous," he said,
because it made Arafat appear to be the victim and the Israeli soldiers
the villains.
On the question of the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations, Sharon
and Mitzva stand at almost opposite ends in the spectrum of Israeli
public opinion. Although Sharon has vaguely promised to make peace some
day, nobody seems to take that serious. He and his allies have never
offered any plan for a realistic settlement of the conflict. Worse yet,
several rightwing politicians have openly demanded the "transfer,"
i.e., the expulsion, of all Palestinians from the occupied territories
to make "Greater Israel" an accomplished fact, from the Mediterranean
Sea to the Jordan River.
Mitzna is willing to restart the talks with the Palestinians where they
ended in January 2000. Jerusalem would be shared with the Palestinian
state, and all settlements in the Gaza and most on the West Bank would
be closed. Mitzna is not convinced that, as Likud claims, Barak gave
the Palestinians the best offer they could possibly hope for. In fact,
Barak never offered Arafat genuine sovereignty for a future Palestinian
state. Mitzna supports the idea of a security fence between Israel and
the future
Palestinian state. It "will not only give extra support to the
security forces, but start to change people's state of mind. It will
create a feeling of borders."
Win or lose, Labor leader Amram Mitzna offers far more vision and hope
for Israelis and Palestinians than the colonialists and ethnic cleansers
in Sharon's rightwing coalition.