Who’s coming to the party?

For years, it was at the forefront of the city’s struggle for pluralism. But how relevant is Meretz after four years with a secular mayor?

By PEGGY CIDOR
Meir Margalit370 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
Meir Margalit370
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)
About 10 years ago, Pepe Alalu, then a newly elected Meretz city councillor, tried to convince his old friend Meir Margalit, at the time a social worker at the Kiryat Menahem community center, to join him. Alalu believed that the only way to effect change was through politics, but Margalit, who couldn’t really afford a full-time voluntary position hesitated, but eventually came on board, and was subsequently elected in the next elections.
Today, Alalu and Margalit, veterans of the local Meretz movement, are competing for the party leadership. After decades of close friendship, they are now accusing each other of attempting to close deals behind the scenes. On Monday, 48 hours before the party primaries, which took place after press time, Alalu openly accused, on his Facebook page, the man many Meretz insiders consider to be his spiritual heir or conspiring behind his back to win votes. Margalit responded the following morning, though a little less harshly, and the last 24 hours of the primaries at Meretz Jerusalem have become an ugly struggle between two old friends who have become foes. With veteran Alalu and Margalit going head to head in an all-or-nothing bid to head the party list ahead of the mayoral and city council elections in October, some observers within Meretz are wondering about the party’s future.
On the one hand, its members worry, now that Meretz’s policy on pluralism and against haredi hegemony has won the support of many in the city, the party’s past supporters may discover that Meretz is no longer the only option available on the local pluralistic political scene. On the other hand, there are a few new names and faces on the list of the candidates for the city council, and this may prove to those in the city who identify as secular-pluralists that Meretz is still in the game.
Tzaphira Allison Stern and Rabbi Ehud Bandel are just two of the new faces on Meretz’s list. Besides Alalu, Margalit and current city councillor Laura Wharton, the list includes newcomers Eyal Akerman, Shimon Yair and Daniel Jonas, together with two veteran candidates from past election campaigns, Shimon Bigelman and Fouad Suleiman. According to Margalit, Suleiman, the first Arab candidate on the list, has a fair chance of reaching the city council – although as an Israeli-Arab, he by no means considers himself a representative of east Jerusalem’s Arab residents.
“I think it is too early to dismiss Meretz as a fair alternative for non-haredi residents of Jerusalem,” says Margalit in response to the growing remarks that with newer groups like Hitorerut and Yerushalmim, Meretz might have become redundant.
“We are not just a small ad-hoc group focused on one issue, important as it may be,” he continues. “After all, we are the only one of these groups that belongs to a national party, which has just doubled its power in the parliament – clearly we expect that the same will happen here in the local elections.”
But the facts show a more complicated picture. There is no denying that Meretz has always been active in the secular struggle in the city – since the stormy protests against the closure of Bar-Ilan Street in the ’90s, and even before that, in the no-less stormy demonstrations led by late Meretz leader Ornan Yekutieli to open the movie theater at Beit Agron on Friday nights. Meretz was also always on the side of those supporting non-kosher eateries and groceries in the city, as far back as the ’80s.
But today, as one activist from one of the organizations of the younger generation in the city says, “Meretz has become the mentor, while others, younger and less concerned with a strong political ideology, are demonstrating in the streets.” The activist explains that “Meretz is of course the organization that showed us the way.
But today, you don’t have to be officially identified with the left wing of the political map to be part of the struggle for a pluralistic city.”According to the activist, this also goes for the feminist message, the efforts to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians, the representation of workers’ rights, and other issues. “In all these fields, Meretz is no longer the sole actor on the stage.”
HOWEVER, THERE are quite a few who still see Meretz as the obvious address. Stern, a single mother of two small children, and the director of the Kolben Dance Company, is one of those people.
She first came to the public’s attention about a year and a half ago, when she refused to roll down the curtains of the Kolben studio, near the Gerard Behar Center, at the request of haredi residents who protested the sight of women dancing. Since that incident, she has become increasingly involved in the city’s affairs and has taken part in numerous protests. This winter, she finally decided to jump on the bandwagon of politics, as she phrases it, and run for a place on the Meretz list. Why Meretz? “I decided to join because of the people in this group,” she says. “I wanted to strengthen the women’s side of the list, to give my support to Laura Wharton and to add my personal voice as a person committed to the arts.”
But first and foremost, she says, she decided to join the party because of its political activism, particularly on the issue of Arab residents and their status.
“There are quite a few groups and individuals who are committed and work for the pluralistic aspects of our life here, but they do not deal with the political issue,” she says. “It is as if it doesn’t exist.
But it does exist, and it is an important aspect of life in this city, and it is crucial in my eyes.”
Alalu says he is not concerned at all about an eventual drop in the need for Meretz’s voice on the city council.
“What do the other groups offer? It’s all sectarian,” he says. “We are exactly the opposite. We have a broad view on various and crucial issues. We don’t focus on the opening or closing of a restaurant or a coffee house here and there; there are some far more important issues here.” He is confident that the left-wing message of Meretz can be heard even in a city traditionally linked with right-wing and religious positions.
“We even have two religious candidates on the list,” he points out. “We are not against religious [people] or religion at all – we are against religious coercion, against the haredization of the city.”
In the past, Alalu has said more than once that a haredi mayor could be preferable to a right-wing mayor who would not respect the Palestinians’ rights in the eastern part of the city. Asked if he would still support a haredi candidate for mayor, Alalu replies that he doesn’t see any representative of the haredi society who could take this “difficult job seriously.”
After a pause, he speculates that the only religious mayor who could succeed in the city is the Messiah, “and as we all know, he isn’t coming soon,” but he adds immediately that “Meretz is committed to an ongoing dialogue with the representatives of haredi society, in order to find the best solutions to the social problems they are facing.”
According to Margalit, meanwhile, the issues surrounding the city’s political status are a far more serious problem than the secular struggles over having leisure and cultural venues open on Shabbat.
“I am torn between my political opinions – a partition of the city that seems to me unavoidable [if we are] to reach a peace agreement – and the humane side, knowing that most of the Palestinians on the east side do not want the Palestinian Authority presence,” admits Margalit.
Asked how this position fit into his campaign in which he did not oppose having Meretz (led by him) join Mayor Nir Barkat’s coalition – he explains that “things can be changed even better from inside.”
As for the relatively unknown religious side of Meretz, this year’s list includes two religious candidates, one of them with a realistic chance of making it to the city council. Bandel, a Conservative rabbi, says that for him, being on the Meretz list “goes without saying,” because of its commitment to peace and its efforts to prevent violations of Arab residents’ rights.
But whatever the election results may be, the real challenge will be on the day after the municipal vote, which is scheduled for October 22. If Meretz manages to reach at least three seats on the city council again, or more, the question will be how the party will work in an eventual coalition with Barkat, if he is reelected as mayor.