Mitzna

This is a sad strategic story, with economic aspects, about the Labor party’s newest superstar, Amnon Mitzna.

Mitzna, according to local press reports, is supposed to be the man who is going to return the Labor party to “Our Gang,” that is, rescue it from the Sephardi, relatively hard-line, Minister of Defense Ben-Eliezer. Mitzna is literally the party’s Great White Hope.

What does it say about a party if it turns to Mitzna, who, according to press reports and the testimony of a former Chief of Staff, walked out of the army during battle saying something like he was too tired to continue; and now he wants to be prime minister of an entire country that is under attack?

What does it say about a party if it turns to Mitzna, who says his main qualification is that he is unqualified, that is, that he is inexperienced in national leadership?

And finally, the economic side of this sad strategic story: Mitzna is attaching himself to Histadrut Chairman Amir Peretz, trying to woo Peretz back to the Labor party and win his support.

Whose side is Mitzna on? Whose side is Labor on? Socialism has kept the Israeli economy sick for decades, and now, having tried socialism and failed, Mitzna is turning to Peretz’s Soviet-style communism, in which the state employees of the Histadrut live high on the hog at the expense of everyone else in the country, a system which has failed all over the world but which Mitzna apparently hopes to sustain in Israel.

Haven’t Israelis suffered enough already?

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