20/7/98

Live, from Jerusalem City Hall...

    It's ... the City Council Show! Star-r-r-r-ing ... that lovable mayor himself, Ehud Olmert! Special guest tonight, Ilana the Cleaning Lady!
    I'm not making fun: a Jerusalem city council meeting really does seem like something for the boob tube: there's a TV camera present, a live studio audience, plenty of showmanship and grandstanding, recognizable stars, and -- no kidding -- the evening I was there, a cleaning lady made an unforgettable cameo appearance. 
    But these meetings are also a solemn exercise in practical democracy, they're dramatic, even violent, and a vivid symptom of what ails our antagonistic society.
    Council meetings are open to the public, and on this evening the public made its presence felt, packing the beautiful Council Hall that Teddy built (as it turned out) for Olmert. Surprisingly, the 100-or-so spectators included at least 25 children, some as young as three or four. At one point, Olmert's voice was drowned out by a brat throwing a Force Five tantrum.
    The kids were there -- not, as I first suspected, to be lulled into drowsiness -- because education was foremost on the council agenda. They came with their parents to pack the hall and give Ornan Yekutieli emphatic support for espousing their concerns.
    Yekutieli bombarded the mayor and his heavily haredi coalition, earned bursts of applause, and when he finished, about half the crowd vanished.
    For much of the rest of the time, Yekutieli meandered about the hall, back-patting, hand-shaking and chatting with confreres, apparently disinterested in the goings-on.
     The city councilors sit around a huge ring-shaped desk, with the mayor, his deputies and vices at the head. On the outer perimeter of the ring are two arcs, where various experts and advisers sit, and beyond them, the bleachers, for the ordinary citizenry.
    Olmert was under close scrutiny, for several reasons: he's the mayor; he believes he's going to be the next prime minister; he's dynamic; and he's the host of this show.
    Everyone seems to have a take on Olmert.
    Notice how he positions the camera, one woman whispered to me; it's behind the haredim, so when you're watching on TV, you don't notice how dominant they are on the city council. (Sure enough, when the cameraman moved to the other side, Olmert objected.) A fellow journalist pointed out that, whereas Teddy would never disappoint if you came to see him taking one of his famous naps, Olmert is constantly alert, scanning the people, like a searchlight. Our crafty mayor, I was told, schedules council meetings for Thursdays, to prevent the mass-circulation weeklies from covering (and criticizing) the proceedings in the next day's newspaper.
    "He's behaving himself today," said someone with an obvious axe to grind. "Usually he's obnoxious."
    The dynamics of these meetings feature caustic showdowns between implacable foes. It's Jerusalem, so you'd expect that. But there are no Arab party councilors (Arabs decline to vote), and the Right-Left rift is blurred in municipal politics; the two sides -- and they are, physically, on two sides of the ring, facing each other -- are the haredim and the secular.
    They seem to disagree on everything, they roar at each other, they smirk together when one from the other side rails against them ... yet, they also work together. Sometimes one will cross over to the other side for a polite chat. At one point, haredi Moshe Cohen ambled over to Pepe Alalu of Meretz for a close tete-a-tete -- one with peyot, the other with a long ponytail.
    (Later, Alalu would launch an attack on the municipal deficit -- a mere half-billion shekels -- but Olmert didn't stay around for this part, excusing himself to see a movie at Sultan's Pool.)
    The haredim were, to a man, hefty, dressed de rigueur in their black and white. The seculars ranged from staid (Shimon Shetreet) to informally colorful (Olmert, in his tieless yellow short-sleeves) to provocatively skimpy (ostentatiously-redheaded Ofra Meyerson of Meretz, who did her best to irk the haredim, and succeeded; at one point, one of them brayed at her, "Liar! Liar! Liar!").
    Then there was Anat Hoffman, standing out in her ironic black and white outfit, which practically mocked the haredim by saying, see, you can't even claim dominance over your signature colors. 
     Hoffman was feisty. She took on the mayor again and again, giving no ground, jawing with him in acrimonious debate throughout the meeting. She's a whirlwind activist, speaking for every unrepresented minority in the city -- her will against a wall of power.
    When Hoffman enters the hall, Olmert and his haredi coalitionists moan a silent "Oh, no."
    For almost four hours, the councilors zinged each other, mostly Hoffman, Meyerson and Yekutieli on one side, Shmuel Yitzhaki, Elazar Gelbstein and Deputy Mayor Haim Miller on the other.
    And the cleaning lady against them all.
    During the debate about the inequality of funding for haredi and secular hugim (after-school activities), a small woman named Ilana suddenly lunged out of the spectators' section, shrieking and gesticulating. She said she was a cleaning lady with three small children who couldn't afford hugim "while the fat-cats gobble down all the arnona tax money."
    Blaming the haredim, she threw herself at them, fists high, as six of the eight guards raced over to subdue her. The place erupted. She pummeled the guards, howling in anger, and managed to ram through the security blockade, coming within half a meter of Yitzhaki's beard.
    Yitzhaki exploded in rage when she screamed at Miller that he was "filth!" (well, she is a cleaning lady), and long after the guards finally dragged her out, Yitzhaki was still shrieking at her.
    Wow!, I said to Hoffman, when the dust had settled, what a show!
    She rolled her eyes, smiling. "And this was one of the quieter meetings."