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Change Your Life! |
Iranian-born Moshe Katsav: President of Israel |
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August 2, 2000
JERUSALEM (AP) - Iranian-born Moshe Katsav, for years an outsider to Israel's establishment, has won election to Israel's most prestigious post - the presidency. In another sign that those once dismissed as marginal have joined Israel's elite, Katsav on Monday defeated Shimon Peres, a former prime minister and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had been considered a shoo-in for the election by the Knesset's 120 legislators. Peres - born in Europe, and a government official virtually since Israel's establishment in 1948 - once epitomized the establishment. Katsav denied his was an "ethnic" candidacy, but could not refrain from noting his humble roots within minutes of his victory. "After all, I am the first generation of the original immigration from Muslim countries to Israel," he told Associated Press Television News. He recalled his youth in immigrant tent encampments, and then in Kiryat Malachi, one of the failed "development" towns Israel's first governments built to populate the desert. Kiryat Malachi was Katsav's first success: in 1969, aged 24, he was elected mayor, Israel's youngest ever. There was a wave of such elections across Israel in the 1960s and 1970s - an uprising against the dominant Labor party, which dismissed the series of upstart victories as an aberration. That was a mistake: the Likud - until then a one-note ultranationalist party - stepped into the breech and cultivated the angry mayors. Katsav, a university student when he elected, was especially notable: he led demonstrations outside the Knesset demanding greater services for towns like his. In 1977, he was inside the Knesset, elected the same year the Likud came to power, swept in on a wave of nationalism and social resentment.
Katsav was already an able political player - "municipalities are the best school for politics," said Likud colleague Meir Shetreet. Katsav was a deputy minister by 1981, and a labor minister by 1984, a year shy of his 40th birthday. He was a tireless campaigner, making appearances at constituents' weddings and bar mitzvahs. He was criticized for granting too many favors, at one point forced by the state comptroller to fire a slew of political appointments from his transport ministry. His political savvy proved invaluable this week, when he used his own religious observance to persuade religious legislators who had committed to Peres to change their minds. It was a stunning upset: trashing earlier media predictions of a 65-45 victory for Peres, with 10 abstentions, Katsav secured 63 votes to take the prize. Katsav said legislators favored his homey approach to the international statesman Peres has become. "The international status of Shimon Peres stood before their eyes, but it would seem they preferred a different style ... calmer, quieter," he said. On foreign policy, Katsav has never been consistent. As transport minister from 1988-92 - the years of the Palestinian "intefadeh," or uprising - he sounded a hard anti-Arab line. In 1989, Katsav made headlines when an aide ordered a journalist off Katsav's bus for reading an Arabic newspaper, saying the language "upsets the minister." Yet in 1993 in opposition, he was the first mainstream Likud figure to call on his colleagues to accept the breakthrough Oslo accords negotiated by the Labor government. His colleagues said his election was no surprise: 23 years after the Likud's first revolutionary victory, those in the margins had joined the power elite. "The election of Moshe Katsav shows that anyone can be president," Shetreet told Israel TV. "Now everyone will be judged on their ability."
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