Israel’s Labour vote for leader

ISRAEL’S Labour Party held a ballot of its members yesterday to pick a new leader.

Dovish retired general Amram Mitzna looks set to take command and put forward new options for peace with the Palestinians.

But with Israeli fears of Palestinian suicide bombings and ambushes running high, Labour's hawkish Likud rivals seem likely to retain power in a general election on January 28, leaving the new Labour chief as head of the parliamentary opposition.

The Labour ballot effectively got campaigning underway in earnest for the election, called early after Labour walked out of a national unity coalition with Likud. Doubt about the outcome is straining Israel's ailing economy and adding to regional uncertainty with a possible US war on Iraq looming.

Opinion polls show retired Major-General Amram Mitzna easily unseating present leader Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, another former general, who pulled Labour out of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's coalition last month in a row over the budget.

"We vote today for the fate of the country," Ben-Eliezer told Israel Radio. "We must lead the nation to a better future and give the public a real alternative."

Mitzna, the mayor of Haifa, criticised Ben-Eliezer for what he saw as harshness in handling the Palestinian uprising during Ben-Eliezer's time as defence minister in Sharon's coalition.

"I have political and security views that are very clear and very different from the way of the present government and I see the social-economic issue as the key to the development of Israeli society," Mitzna told Channel Two television.

The Haifa mayor was surrounded by supporters as he toured party polling stations yesterday. "The people are waiting for a different leadership," read blue-and-white placards.

Former foreign minister Shimon Peres is not seeking to lead the Labour party again. Whoever does will face Sharon or his Likud rival Benjamin Netanyahu in the bid to be prime minister.

Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, a top aide to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, said the Palestinian leadership was prepared to negotiate peace with the new leader, provided he agreed to end "occupation of our lands" within a year.

"If the Labour Party adopts a new program of withdrawal, as they did in southern Lebanon, we will promptly carry out contacts with it," he said.

Mitzna favours resuming talks with the Palestinians on the basis of an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories to make way for a peace settlement between two sovereign states.

He has said that even if Arafat whom many in Israel hold responsible for bloodshed that has claimed 1,665 Palestinian and 640 Israeli lives fails as a peace partner, he would unilaterally evacuate from much of the territory.

The latest Israeli victim of violence that erupted in September 2000 after talks on Palestinian statehood stalled was an Israeli woman from a Jewish settlement, shot dead on Monday as she drove past the West Bank city of Ramallah.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility from the militant groups that have frequently targeted settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lands Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war and which Palestinians want for a state.

Israel yesterday arrested 16 Palestinians in the West Bank three from Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for a major shooting in Hebron on Friday, and a Palestinian from Al-Khader, who the army said had planned suicide attacks.