Israeli opposition party leader resigns

Amram Mitzna, the Israeli ex-general who led his once-dominant Labour Party to its worst-ever election defeat in January, has resigned as party leader, dealing another blow to the country’s already battered peace camp.

“I am returning the mandate and resigning as head of the Labour Party,” Mr Mitzna said at a hastily called news conference yesterday, just six months after he took the post.

In January 28 elections, with Palestinian-Israeli violence at its height, voters repudiated Mr Mitzna’s party, which ran on the basis of his call for a unilateral pull-out from all of the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank and quick building of a semi-permanent border fence, a concept he called ”unilateral separation” from the Palestinians to keep suicide bombers out.

Polls showed that a sizeable number of Israelis favoured the concept, but Mr Mitzna was not able to cash in. In the election, Labour, Israel’s unchallenged leader for its first 30 years, dropped from 26 seats to 19 in the 120-seat parliament. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s hard-line Likud Party doubled its strength from 19 to 38 seats and easily formed a majority government coalition without Labour.

Starting the election campaign far behind Mr Sharon, Mr Mitzna was unable to close the gap. The bespectacled, bearded ex-general with a reedy, tenor voice, waging his first national campaign after 10 years as mayor of Haifa, failed to inspire voter confidence against Mr Sharon, an ex-general with decades of Cabinet experience and a term as premier behind him.

Yesterday, Mr Mitzna blamed party squabbling for his failure. “

I am sure that the political lines I presented and the policies I laid out are correct,” he said. “But I am less sure of my ability and will to repeatedly deal with, every morning, (challenges) to the legitimacy of my leadership.”

His resignation is another blow to the Labour-led Israeli camp that championed the gradual process of peacemaking with the Palestinians that has collapsed under the weight of more than two years of violence.

Mr Mitzna, 58, took over the reins of the Labour Party last November, when the party was already dropping in the polls over its membership in Mr Sharon’s first coalition government. Critics inside the party charged that Labour was losing its trademark pro-peace image by backing Mr Sharon’s harsh military moves against the Palestinians, with Israeli forces reoccupying most West Bank population centres in response to Palestinian suicide bomb attacks.

With Mr Mitzna’s resignation, the party leadership is seen likely to revert to a relative hard-liner, like the man he replaced, ex-general Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who served as defence minister in Mr Sharon’s first government and has hinted he would like to join the present one.

Other possible replacements are Matan Vilnai, another ex-general, and elder statesman Shimon Peres, 79, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 along with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for starting Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.

Also, ex-premier Ehud Barak, trounced by Mr Sharon in a 2001 election after peace talks broke down and violence erupted, might consider a comeback.

Party secretary Ofir Pines said a new leader would probably be chosen by the end of July.