President's Election a Big Win for Israel's Have-Nots

By MARY CURTIUS

Aug. 3, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

KIRYAT MALACHI, Israel — Nowhere in Israel was Moshe Katsav’s election to the presidency welcomed with more joy than in this hardscrabble southern town that he calls home.

Katsav’s upset victory over Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres this week is not just the biggest thing that has happened here, Kiryat Malachi residents said. It may also be the biggest thing that has happened to the nation’s have-nots--primarily immigrants from Middle Eastern countries and their descendants, who make up 40% of the Jewish population of Israel but have long felt locked out of its corridors of power.

“Today the Berlin Wall that separated the people artificially has fallen,” said Rabbi Yosef Azran, a leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, after its members helped Katsav secure his election.

Labor Party supporters such as author Amos Oz, alarmed by the coalition of ultra-Orthodox and right-wing lawmakers who elected the 55-year-old Katsav, lamented the dovish Peres’ defeat, “not for the first time, mainly by a coalition which is hawkish, haredi [ultra-Orthodox], reality-resistant, anti-peace and opposed to progress and enlightenment.”

But the people of Kiryat Malachi and similar towns on Israel’s periphery saw Katsav’s election as a turning point for the nation’s disenfranchised, the so-called Second Israel. In a town where 45% of the residents receive government assistance and hope is a scarce commodity, Katsav’s election had everyone talking about possibilities.

After news of his victory broke, residents rushed to Katsav’s mother’s home and to the modest, white-stucco villa nearby where Katsav has lived for more than 20 years. On a sultry summer night, hundreds danced in the streets until the wee hours of the morning. When a tired and happy Katsav--now surrounded by bodyguards--arrived, women ululated joyously, and children reached out eagerly to touch him.

“This celebration, it was spontaneous and it came from the stomach, from something they held inside of them for many years,” said Yitzhak Peretz, a lifelong resident who now serves as spokesman for Mayor Lior Katsav, the new president’s younger brother.

“Katsav’s election makes everybody change his worldview,” Peretz said. “Those who have been lamenting the discrimination the Second Israel suffers now have proof that you can do it, you can make it here. The others, those who thought that it was not the time for one from Second Israel to make it to the top of the pyramid here, saw that they were wrong.”

Maybe, residents said, the fact that Kiryat Malachi (“City of Angels”) is named after Los Angeles--whose Jews donated heavily to the town’s first housing project--would no longer seem a cruel joke. The dismal collection of crumbling apartment blocks, garbage-strewn streets and dingy shops is the furthest thing from Israelis’ glittering image of the California metropolis.

“I was with a group of women from Kiryat Malachi in Holon when the news arrived,” said Levana Rashid, who was born here and now owns the local newspaper. “Right away, people looked at us in a different light, and we all celebrated.”

A Labor Party supporter, Rashid said she grieved after seeing the humiliation inflicted on Peres by the loss of a vote in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that all the pundits had predicted he would win easily.

“But for my town, I am happy,” she said. “Always before, the news about Kiryat Malachi was about crime, poverty, unemployment and other problems. Now the No. 1 man in Israel is from Kiryat Malachi.”

Rashid rushed home from Holon, just southeast of Tel Aviv, to put out a special edition of the newspaper to mark Katsav’s victory.

Mazal Rahamim, Katsav’s neighbor, said that neither the crowds in her street, nor the police barricades, nor the flood of floral arrangements piling up on her patio bothered her. So many flowers flooded into the Katsavs’ home that the family asked her to handle the overflow, Rahamim said.

Outside Kiryat Malachi, the same commentators who had confidently predicted that Peres would easily defeat Katsav tried to figure out the implications of the upset.

At Katsav’s swearing-in Tuesday, each speaker said his elevation to the largely ceremonial office was powerfully symbolic.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who had supported Peres, lauded the new president as a Lincolnesque figure.

“This election proves that there isn’t a Second Israel,” Barak declared. “Israel is one. And every child--whether in a city, a villa, a kibbutz or a development town, potentially carries in his backpack the scepter of the presidency.”

But the mere fact that politicians and commentators were hailing Katsav as the first representative of Second Israel to make it to the highest office in the land struck some as ironic.

“Mr. Katsav has spent 30 years in the mainstream of Israeli politics, he is a fixture of the political establishment,” said Vicki Shiran, an activist with the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow, an advocacy group for Israelis from Arab countries and their descendants.

“And yet he’s hailed as this symbol of a development town. He is also the first right-wing president, but nobody speaks about that, just about the fact that he is from Second Israel. That alone shows that the ethnic problem in Israel is still very significant.”

Katsav’s story is a dramatic one. Born in Iran, he came with his family to the young Jewish state in 1951, when he was 5. Officials sent them to a camp near the southern coast that later became Kiryat Malachi.

The family lived first in a tent, then in the hastily built apartment blocks put up in the 1950s to handle the immigrants flooding here from Arab countries. The apartment blocks quickly became slums, and Kiryat Malachi became a dumping ground for “problematic” immigrants, Jews with little education and few resources from Arab countries, then from Ethiopia and more recently from the poorer areas of the former Soviet Union.

Peretz said about 40% of the town’s residents immigrated to Israel in the past 10 years. All too often, the ones who assimilate well leave, and the ones who don’t, stay behind. The Katsavs are an exception.

Katsav, whose father worked in a twine factory, told his biographer that he had to overcome feelings of inadequacy before applying to college. At 24, he was elected the nation’s youngest mayor; he was the first mayor of Kiryat Malachi to hold a university degree.

He later was mentored by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who made him a deputy minister in his government. In 1984, he became the youngest minister in Yitzhak Shamir’s government and later served in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet after losing to the latter in a fight to head the Likud Party.

He is fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi and English. Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi said that Katsav’s Middle Eastern heritage makes him the first Israeli president “who looks more like [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak than Bill Clinton.”

After Katsav’s election, his brother Lior rejoiced on Israel Television that the president’s house in Jerusalem, which until now had been the site of “cocktail parties for diplomats,” would now open its doors to ordinary Israelis.

Katsav has promised to be a president who stays above the political fray and devotes himself to domestic issues. In Kiryat Malachi, that promise was seen as a pledge to help such towns, where unemployment and crime rates are high and faith in the government is abysmally low.

“This will change our image,” predicted Peretz, the mayor’s spokesman.

“This will add to our self-confidence and help us believe in ourselves. Maybe even the people who have left will return.”