A Second Act for Amram Mitzna?

Amram Mitzna was once a rising star in Israel's Labor Party: retired Major General, successful Mayor of Haifa, and in 2003, the Labor Party's nominee for Prime Minister. Ariel Sharon's Likud not only trounced Labor that year and won twice as many seats, Labor's worst performance up to then (matched in 2009 with only 19 seats), and Mitzna stepped down. He spent five years as Mayor of Yeruham, a post from which he recently stepped down; he stopped being active in Labor in 2005.

Now, Haaretz is reporting, Ehud Barak is trying to lure Mitzna back into active Labor Party politics. Perhaps, they suggest, as his successor. Mitzna, like Barak, is a former general, though he has a rather dovish record for an IDF general, and clearly Labor is struggling to find a future leader.

But is one of its worst-performing candidates ever the right answer? Labor, of course, is not its old self. Likud is the ruling party; Kadima heads the opposition. Barak has brought Labor into an uncomfortable coalition. The party that utterly dominated Israeli politics from 1948-1977, the party of David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharrett, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin, has seen leaders like Mitzna, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, and Amir Peretz. (If you said "Who?" to any of the last three, you're not alone.) If Barak's best hope for the party is to woo Mitzna back to a leadership role, or to try to forge a new leftist bloc around him, it may be a sad indicator of how far downward Labor has come. Kadima is full of people who spent their career in Likud, but is oddly enough now the opposition in Israel.