Fifty is a nice round number. When the brand-new Tel Aviv urban area light-rail system finally opened last week, all the news stories referred to a decision made by the Golda Meir government in April 1973 as the start of the project, making it a round half-century from inception to completion.
But dates are as movable as goalposts and there are any number of dates stretching back to the pre-independence era and all the way forward to the start of the current century when the project, which has been through an interminable series of stops and starts, can be said to have begun.
But 50 years fits, especially when you compare it to other complex Israeli projects.
It symbolises so many things about the country that took 50 years to build the first light-rail line, using technology that has been around since the 19th century, in its largest urban area (the Red Line opened last week is just one of three lines currently planned, and no one is taking bets when the next two will be ready), while the Iron Dome missile defence system, which was totally innovative in just about everything it does, took only five years from original concept to first operational use.
The ironies and symbolisms just pile up. At the official opening ceremony of what is supposed to solve at least part of Tel Aviv’s congestion problems, dozens of streets in the city were closed “for security reasons” so that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could speak at the ceremony. His government routinely complains that the police allow the pro-democracy protesters (who were, of course, protesting again, though at a prescribed distance) to block roads in Tel Aviv.
Benjamin Netanyahu Attending the Dedication Ceremony for the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area Light Rail 4
Benjamin Netanyahu opens Tel Aviv’s light-rail system with transport minister Miri Regev (second left) (Photo: Flash 90)
And while the government put on a big show, the local government, personified by Tel Aviv’s veteran mayor Ron Huldai, boycotted the event in protest at the light-rail not operating on Shabbat, as “it should in a liberal and democratic state”, according to Huldai.
By the way, if 50 years sounds like a long time to wait for a mass-transportation network, it’s positively short-term when compared to the Tel Aviv underground, which was first mooted in the 1930s back in the days of the British Mandate.
Underground trains, which don’t have to share roads with other vehicles, are faster and have greater capacity (the new light-rail is already projected to lack the capacity the metropolis needs).
The plans for the underground have been prepared by the transport ministry and last year, just before the Knesset was dissolved on the eve of the elections, the outgoing Bennett-Lapid government (which had approved running the light-rail on Shabbat) tried to pass the laws for the work to go ahead.
The opposition refused to cooperate and when the Netanyahu government came into office, new transport minister Miri Regev (who failed to validate her ticket when she boarded the light-rail’s first journey) announced that “there won’t be an underground in Tel Aviv until Kiryat Shmona is connected by train to the centre of the country”.
Benjamin Netanyahu Attending the Dedication Ceremony for the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area Light Rail 6
Netanyahu aboard the new light railway (Photo: Flash 90)
Decades from now, when the first Tel Aviv underground line is inaugurated, they will talk of how it was a century in the planning.
There you have it: Israel is a two-speed country where high-tech and security projects can proceed at the speed of light while civilian infrastructure projects make HS2 look like a whirlwind success story.
Where the most secular city in the country can’t use its trains on Shabbat and where just about any event is subsumed by the never-ending controversy over the legitimacy of the prime minister.
LABOUR PAINS:
Mayor Huldai’s boycott of the ceremony is also connected to local politics. In just over two months, he will be facing what is likely to be the toughest election battle since he was first elected mayor a quarter of a century ago.
Former prime minister Yair Lapid’s party, Yesh Atid, is for the first time running a candidate for mayor in the city where it had the largest proportion of the vote in last year’s national election: Orna Barbivai, business minister in the last government and the first woman to have served as a major-general in the IDF.
Yair Lapid arrives to testify in the trial against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Yair Lapid (Photo: Flash 90)
For Yesh Atid, which is the most successful centrist party in Israeli political history, this makes perfect sense. Local government is a useful power base while the party is in opposition in the Knesset.
But some in the party and in the wider opposition bloc are concerned that this will cause unnecessary strife when they feel that all forces should be united against the government.
It’s not just party politics, however. While Huldai’s long tenure is widely regarded as a success, there’s a lot of grumbling that at 78 and after so long in office, he has “become too much like Netanyahu and doesn’t understand that it’s time to go”.
Ron Huldai ( F210704TN15
Ron Huldai (Photo: Flash 90)
Huldai is not entirely impervious to these complaints and has floated the idea of enlisting a running mate, probably the popular former deputy mayor Asaf Zamir, who was for a short time also a Blue and White Knesset member and more recently Israel’s consul-general in New York until he resigned in protest over the Netanyahu government’s policies.
The plan, which sources close to Huldai have leaked to the media, is that Zamir will replace him as mayor mid-term.
Whether or not they go through with the plan, it is another stage in the historic demise of Israel’s founding party, Labour, of which Huldai is a member, and its replacement in the centre ground of Israeli politics by Yesh Atid.
Head of Labour party
Labour party leader Merav Michaeli (Photo: handout)
Labour leader Merav Michaeli has been quick to endorse Huldai, but seeing that she is now probably the least popular leader of any Israeli party (since the election Labour has failed in all the polls to cross the electoral threshold of 3.25 per cent), that’s an endorsement he could have done without.
THE REBBE WON’T BUDGE:
A few more stops along the new Red Line, there’s another local election battle with even greater national implications. In Bnei Brak, Israel’s largest Charedi city just east of Tel Aviv, the identity of the next mayor could topple the government.
For the past 25 years, the two parties that make up United Torah Judaism — Hasidic Agudath Yisrael and “Lithuanian” Degel Ha’Torah — have taken turns in the mayor’s office, with a representative of either party running as the main Charedi candidate and winning handily.
This time around, it’s Aguda’s turn and the Grand Rabbi of Ger Chasidim, Yaakov Alter, has ruled that his loyal follower, former mayor Hanoch Zeibert, will return to office.
But the high-handed Zeibert is not loved among many of the city’s communities and Degel Ha’Torah’s local rabbis and machers are threatening to boycott his candidacy.
The other Charedi party, Shas, which in the past usually endorsed the UTJ candidate, including Zeibert back in 2013, has already fielded its own candidate, in the hope of capitalising on the UTJ discord.
Rabbi Yaakov F230509DC053
Rabbi Yaakov (Photo: Copyright Unknown)
Degel leaders have implored the Gerer Rebbe to choose another candidate, but so far Alter is obdurate.
With the exception of Jerusalem, Bnei Brak’s City Hall is the most important local government for the Charedi community, and if the parties cannot reach a compromise, it will cause strife within the coalition and as one Ger macher predicted this week, “The Rebbe will be even more insistent that UTJ demand the government pass a maximalist version of the draft-exemption law.”
The Charedi parties have been promised by Netanyahu that when the Knesset begins its winter session in October, the first item on the coalition’s agenda will be the law exempting yeshivah students from military service.
Netanyahu is fully aware that nothing will energise the protest movement against his government more than such a law and has been frantically beseeching them to tone it down, so it doesn’t also include a Supreme Court “override clause”.
But on this also, at least so far, Rabbi Alter, the most senior of the Chasidic rabbis leading Aguda, has so far refused to budge. If he doesn’t get his way in Bnei Brak, some of his Chasidim are convinced that “he will go all the way and use the draft exemption law to bring down the government”.
