JERUSALEM (JTA) — Labor Knesset member Uzi Baram dropped his candidacy for the party’s chairmanship this week and threw his support behind rival Ehud Barak.
Baram said he believed that Barak, a Labor Knesset member and former foreign minister, would be good for the strength of the party and that his candidacy for the premiership would boost the party’s chances in the next national elections, slated for the year 2000.
Sources close to Baram, who finished first in Labor Party primaries last year, said he made his decision after determining that he could not beat Barak in the internal party elections that are scheduled for June.
Labor Knesset members Haim Ramon and Ephraim Sneh, who also are vying for party leadership, said they were not surprised.
General who met with Labor quits
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel’s coordinator of activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Oren Shahor, has announced his resignation.
The 32-year veteran’s resignation was expected after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended him last month as head of the Israeli team negotiating civilian issues with the Palestinians.
Netanyahu’s action came in the wake of an Israeli newspaper report on meetings between Shahor and Labor Party officials.
While Shahor maintained at the time that the meetings were of a personal nature, government officials said it was unacceptable for them to take place without their knowledge.
At a news conference this week, Shahor said he had “made a mistake” in not seeking permission from the defense minister and prime minister to hold the meetings.
Israel denies plan for interfaith capital
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel denied this week that it had agreed to a Jordanian proposal to make Jerusalem a capital for the three great monotheistic religions.
Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy said Sunday that King Hussein had not mentioned Jerusalem as a capital “of the three religions,” Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in any recent discussions with Israeli officials.
Nor had the king sent a specific letter on the matter, Levy said.
Levy said the king had suggested opening an interfaith dialogue on the future of Jerusalem as a religious center.
King Hussein’s idea “is that religious leaders should meet and have a measure of dialogue about the status of Jerusalem and the holy places,” Levy told Israel Radio.
Efforts to free Arad are bogging down
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Senior Iranian officials have charged that hard-line positions by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have blocked progress in efforts to secure information about missing Israeli airman Ron Arad.
Israeli officials denied the charges, which appeared last month in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Arad’s fighter plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986.
Senior Israeli officials negotiating Arad’s release denied the report’s claims.
Israel maintains Iran is holding Arad. But Iranian officials said in the article they received hints from Syria that Damascus held the key to information on Arad’s fate. Israel disputed that claim.
Netanyahu nanny sues for back pay
JERUSALEM (JTA) — A former nanny for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s two young sons is suing the prime minister and his wife for $36,000 in back pay.
South African-born Tanya Shaw, 21, said in a petition to the Jerusalem labor court that Netanyahu and his wife Sara had not paid her extra wages for overtime and for work on the Sabbath during her six months of employment.
A lawyer for Sara Netanyahu said the former employee had no right to make the claims under her contract and that the suit was being filed out of spite.
When she was dismissed in July, Shaw said in media interviews that Netanyahu had literally tossed her out on the street for burning a pot of soup. Shaw described her former employer as being obsessed with cleanliness.