The Doves Fly Again

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THOMAS COEX/AFP TAKING AIM: An Israeli soldier on patrol in Bethlehem Alone among mainstream Israeli politicians, Amram Mitzna sports a beard. Sectarians — Israeli Arabs, Ultra-Orthodox Jews and settlers — grow hair on their chins, but the rest of the political spectrum is clean-shaven. So the whiskers of Mitzna, who was picked last week to lead the Labor Party into national elections in January, have come to symbolize the enigma of this newcomer. Is there a strong, decisive chin beneath the fuzz, or is he soft and fluffy, like the beard?

Labor's 130,000 members voted overwhelmingly to find out. Many who supported Mitzna in the primary say they don't really know what kind of a man he is, but that anything's better than the man he defeated, party hack Binyamin Ben-Eliezer. And they don't expect Mitzna to lead them to victory in the elections, which are likely to show a wartime swing to the right. After 20 months in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "national unity" coalition, Labor just wants a dovish alternative to the hard line. They can count on Mitzna for that. As Prime Minister, he promises, he'd restart negotiations with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. If there was no peace agreement after a year of talks, he'd unilaterally withdraw from the entire Gaza Strip and evacuate the 7,000 Israeli settlers there.

It's a sharp change from Ben-Eliezer, who as Sharon's Defense Minister oversaw massive military operations against the Palestinians. But it seems just as pointedly at odds with the Israeli mood. Instead of bringing centrist Israelis back to Labor, Mitzna appears likely to poach from other dovish parties in a shrinking pool of leftist voters. "Mitzna has vacated the center and Sharon is sliding in," says Dan Schueftan, a Haifa University professor and friend of Mitzna.

Sharon's response to the Jerusalem bus bomb that killed 11 Israelis last Thursday shows what Mitzna is up against. To cast himself as the moderate in this week's Likud primary, where he'll face off against Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon ordered Israeli troops to close in on Bethlehem, the bomber's hometown. But the military operation was much more restrained than the massive invasions of the spring and summer. The 74-year-old Prime Minister is staking out the political center, because the hard-line Netanyahu and Mitzna have staked out the extremes. Sharon leads in the polls against both.

The day of the bus bombing, Mitzna sat with aides in a small meeting room at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, preparing his address to the Labor Central Committee in the main auditorium. Sipping a bottle of water, he deleted some of the dovish statements he'd intended to make. "I have to take into consideration the mood in tomorrow's newspapers," he muttered.

When there's breathing space between the bombings, Mitzna isn't so reserved. During an often nasty primary campaign, he cast himself as a provincial outsider who promised to "clean out the bullshit culture" of the Labor Party. He wants to bring back people like Yossi Beilin, an architect of the Oslo peace process who withdrew during Ben-Eliezer's reign. He welcomed warm remarks about his election from Arafat, who's utterly demonized by most Israelis now. Though he's married to a Bible teacher, he risked alienating religious voters by admitting that he doesn't believe in God.

Born on a kibbutz, 57-year-old Mitzna was a military golden boy, wounded in Israel's 1967 and 1973 wars. But during the controversial 1982 Lebanon War, Mitzna wrote to his chiefs demanding the dismissal of then-Defense Minister Sharon. As commander in the West Bank, he left his job two years into the first intifadeh, saying he'd had enough. To left-wingers, those are admirable stands. Yet then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin persuaded Mitzna to withdraw the Lebanon dismissal letter, and people close to him say he quit the West Bank job because he was just tired of criticism from the left and right. Labor rival Haim Ramon says Mitzna is all "bullshit and baloney."

Mitzna left the army in 1993 and later that year became mayor of Haifa, one of the few places in Israel where Jewish and Arab citizens mix relatively easily. Mitzna has earned credit for that among Israeli Arabs, more than 80% of whom boycotted the last election. But one group of Arabs won't be persuaded. Islamist groups are eager to step up their suicide bombings before the election with the aim of pushing Israelis still farther away from negotiations. "Hamas and Islamic Jihad are going to decide the Israeli elections," says a senior Palestinian security official. Israel's right wing already has a clear lead. If Hamas continues to tug on Mitzna's beard, that margin could become devastating.