Stormy council

Drama at the Jerusalem municipality meeting raises eyebrows and some questions.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Underlying much of the drama at the municipality is the growing tension between Mayor Nir Barkat (pictured) and Deputy Mayor Ofer Berkovitch. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Underlying much of the drama at the municipality is the growing tension between Mayor Nir Barkat (pictured) and Deputy Mayor Ofer Berkovitch.
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Stormy meetings of the city council are nothing new, but some observers at the August 31 meeting said that the level of anger and resentment might have surpassed anything seen previously.
Shouting, accusations and shut-down microphones characterized the session, with angry cries emanating from the public section, occupied mostly by parents of the children affected by the pediatric hematology-oncology crisis at Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem. The parents were seeking help to cope with their situation.
Opposition council member Fleur Hassan-Nahoum (Yerushalmim) presented a motion to grant an arnona (property tax) discount to parents of children suffering from cancer who now must travel to the center of the country for treatment. She accused Mayor Nir Barkat of abandoning these families by supporting Health Minister Ya’acov Litzman’s decision to prevent a new department from opening in Shaare Zedek Medical Center. The motion was rejected.
Additional fireworks took place two days prior to that when secretary- general of the Jerusalem district of the Histadrut – a former president of the workers’ committee at Safra Square who was convicted of crimes related to bribes and corruption, and has, surprisingly, become an ally of Barkat – threatened Deputy Mayor Ofer Berkovitch and blocked the door to his office, accompanied by a few municipality employees. He accused Berkovitch of crossing a red line by directly addressing a certain employees, skipping the formal procedure requiring council members to address those workers only through municipal section directors.
Underlying much of the drama at the municipality is the growing tension between Barkat and Berkovitch because he and additional members of his Hitorerut list have refrained from supporting many of the mayor’s decisions, and have even come out against him openly. One recent instance of friction was Barkat’s decision to channel unused budgets into additional cultural events. Berkovitch, holding the culture portfolio, insisted that it was not necessary, preferring the funds to be applied toward better cleaning the city.
Another bone of contention is Barkat’s plan to redistribute some neighborhood education facilities between haredi and non-haredi residents – a plan that Barkat says will be a “historical achievement.”
Berkovitch and the rest of the opposition see it as a total surrender to haredi pressure, or perhaps a blatant move by Barkat to gain haredi support for his future plans – either a third tenure at the city’s helm or a jump to the Knesset and the national government.
There is pressure on Berkovitch to leave the coalition and openly challenge the mayor, but he is not ready to cross that Rubicon. However, one of the members of his list, city council member Hanan Rubin, did resign earlier this week. He wrote in an open letter that his position on the city council over the past nine years had bred a degree of hubris and he wished to return to a more humble position – an unusual declaration in today’s political world.
It is too early to say whether Rubin’s resignation is the first of many resignations, but the level of disagreement and distrust between parties that should share the same goals and serve the same population might be a reason why haredim may believe that their interests are safer in the hands of secular representatives than in their own hands.