An Israeli candidate touts his city

Two years ago, as Israeli Arab demonstrations in solidarity with the intifada uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip spread into the port city of Haifa, tragedy seemed imminent.

Protests and stonethrowing picked up momentum at the edge of the Arab Wadi Nisnas neighborhood, near the waterfront. Police gunfire appeared inevitable. But the town's Jewish mayor, Amram Mitzna, a former general, intervened.

"To Mitzna's credit, he stood in the middle of the demonstrators and asked the police not to shoot," recalled Ayman Odeh, a Haifa city councillor. "And no one can ever take that action away from him." Unlike the rest of Israel, where 13 Arabs died, prompting a state commission of inquiry into police behavior, no one was hurt in Haifa. And Mr. Mitzna, Arab residents recall, kept a promise to gain release from prison of Arabs who were arrested that day.

Having won control of the Labor Party in his first foray into national politics, Mitzna is running for prime minister after serving as Haifa's mayor for nine years. And he is stressing the relatively harmonious relations of Jews and Arabs in Haifa as one of his major accomplishments. Since he has no previous experience in national politics, his policies in Haifa may offer a window into his views on Israel's relations with its Arab minority and the Arab world.

"I won't be changing my world view," he said in this week's Ha'aretz magazine. "My worldview is crystallized and the way it has been expressed in the Haifa municipality will be the way it will be expressed in the government."

Mitzna's depiction of his hilly, picturesque city, which has an Arab minority of about 10 percent of its 270,000 residents, is seen by many as an idealization, or at least a campaign spin. There have been two suicide bombings here and Israeli army actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have angered Arab residents. Distrust among the communities runs high. But most people think it would be worse if not for Mitzna.

"There is a consensus that Mitzna has done more for coexistence than any mayor before him, but even during Mitzna's time there has not been complete equality," says Mr. Odeh, the city councillor whose Hadash party is part of Mitzna's coalition. Its participation, which includes a deputy mayor, is in itself a rarity in Israeli politics, where Arab-oriented parties are usually shunned by Jewish politicians.

Moti Peri, director of the municipality-funded Bet HaGefen Arab-Jewish Center, who works with the mayor on projects, says that Mitzna has put great stress on "symbolic politics" in his relations with Arabs.

Yesterday, in one of his first acts at the helm of Labor, Mitzna sent lawmaker Yossi Katz to Cairo for talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher. And in 1996, when the mayor of another town, Safed, declared Abu Mazen, a senior PLO official born in Safed, to be unwelcome there, Mitzna issued a public invitation for him to visit Haifa, Mr. Peri recalls. And until the peace process collapsed in 2000, the mayor also sponsored Arab cultural festivals including representatives from the Gaza Strip, who marched down a major street with a Palestinian flag, he adds. In the practical realm, Mitzna broke ground by appointing Arabs to senior positions in the municipality, including its treasurer, Jacky Wakeem, says Peri.

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