All four men seeking capital's top job speak at packed 'Jerusalem Post' Town Hall debate.
By DAN IZENBERGbarkat porush gaydamak horovitz 224 88(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
If east Jerusalem ever becomes part of a Palestinian state in the context of a peace agreement, it will not be because of the Jewish residents of the city or their municipal leaders.
That emerged clearly during a presentation and question-and-answer session that included all four candidates for mayor before a packed audience of mostly English-speakers at Jerusalem's Great Synagogue on Saturday evening.
Interest in the forum was so high that dozens had to be turned away at the doors for lack of space.
The event - which uniquely brought together all four mayoral candidates - was jointly sponsored by The Jerusalem Post, AACI and the Great Synagogue.
Three of the four candidates, Meir Porush, Arkadi Gaydamak and Nir Barkat, made it clear that they wanted to keep the city united under Jewish sovereignty. The fourth candidate and most politically liberal, Dan Birron, did not mention the issue in his speech.
Porush, who served on the Jerusalem City Council for 13 years before joining the Knesset and heading the Construction and Housing Ministry in the Netanyahu government, emphasized his experience in municipal and housing affairs.
He said that as deputy housing minister (there was no minister above him) he was responsible for building 150,000 homes throughout the country.
As mayor, he wants to build sufficient inexpensive housing to attract 100,000 more Jews to Jerusalem. He also said he would bring new industry to the city to employ them. By doing so, he would restore the proportion of Jews and Arabs to its 1967 level of 72 percent Jewish and 28% Arab.
Gaydamak presented a grand vision of Jerusalem's potential. He said he would see to it that the standard of living in Arab Jerusalem would be equal to that of the city's Jewish neighborhoods.
In creating true equality, Jerusalem would become the model for genuine coexistence between Israel and the Arab states, which would lead to a resolution of the Middle East conflict and world peace, he said.
Gaydamak acknowledged that he knew little about the nitty gritty of urban issues such as sanitation or transportation. He said he would leave that to the professionals, but would oversee their work and demand satisfactory results or replace them with people who could produce them.
Barkat stressed his experience as a hi-tech entrepreneur and a philanthropist. He has been a member of the city council for the past five years. He said that he had established a set of goals that his administration would seek to achieve and that he would "synchronize" all the elements.
Barkat said he also had a vision of Jerusalem, which he called the most important city in the world - one which 3.4 billion people in the world want to visit at least once in their lives.
But the potential has not been fulfilled, he said. To accomplish this, he would work to show off Jerusalem's Jewish roots from the days of antiquity. He referred to the archeological excavations being carried out in the City of David (Silwan), under the leadership of the Elad settlement movement.
"The City of David is proof of what we can do for the rest of the city," he said.
Barkat also stressed that he came from the business world and spoke entrepreneurs' language. Because of his experience, he said, he knows how to attract new business to the capital, saying that the city's future is dependent on private enterprise and not government handouts.
Although with the exception of Porush, none of the candidates could be described as a politician, Birron was clearly the least "political" of the four men.
He said he decided to run for mayor after he had heard on the news that Barkat wanted to include former Shas chairman Aryeh Deri in his mayoral team (a fact later denied by Barkat.)
Birron said he had agreed to speak at the Great Synagogue under protest because politics and religion should be separated. He also said that Jerusalem should not be run by a haredi mayor since the haredim were a minority of the population.
He called for a clean city "because nowadays, Jerusalem is dirty. Then we believe in live and let live. Don't tell us what to do. Don't tell us what to cook, what to eat, where to go and spend our time," he said.
Birron called for public transportation in the city on Shabbat - the only statement he made that evoked cries of protest from a largely religious audience - and for civil marriage.
David Horovitz, editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, who moderated the evening, urged the audience to vote after having heard the candidates.
"November 11's vote might not be for national elections - though those may be round the corner, too - but they are still a high-stakes vote.
"This is our beloved capital, and the man who sits in the mayor's office has an immense impact on our city - on housing and construction, on city taxes, on security, on education, dare I say traffic flow, and every aspect of relations among the various population sectors in our complex Jerusalem - in fact on the very nature of Jerusalem's demographic make-up," Horovitz said.
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