Last update - 00:00 13/12/2007
Eli Moyal's resignation / The mayor of wretchedville
Quasi-punk and quasi-politician, Eli Moyal fit Sderot like a glove. He took the town by storm with his big and empty promises. His eloquent but excoriating tongue, not mention subversive ways, resonated with residents. He jumped at the chance to lambaste the state, the government, the establishment, Arik Sharon, Ehud Olmert, finance ministers, the left, the army - the list goes on.
As bad luck would have it, shortly after he took office, Sderot became a convenient target for rocket fire from Beit Hanun, the neighbor across the way. It wasn't enough for Sderot residents to be poor and unemployed, now they had to contend with a ceaseless downpour of rockets that drove them nuts.
Since April 2001, angry Palestinian neighbors have rained 5,780 rockets and mortar shells on the poor city, not including the 20 that hit it yesterday. Moyal, who was elected in 1998 to boost the town's standard of living, instead became an expert on the nature of the Qassam and its remnants. Thus the southern lawyer with the big ambitions went from firebrand to one who puts out fires.
As their troubles increased, residents' dependence on the state grew, along with their cries for help. The result was devastating. From a community that was on a forward track, Sderot regressed back to those bad years when it needed the state's charity to survive. Now every hit elicited good-will gestures and truckloads of food and clothes. Kibbutzim and moshavim and major cities and medium-size towns and high-tech companies and insurance firms and banks and factories began funneling generous aid to the city to ease its pain.
Mayor Eli Moyal oversaw this wretched change. The city regressed 20 years and Moyal, along with the community's managers and city council members, regressed along with it. The man who once dreamed of getting residents of poor towns to become more independent gave up and watched as the opposite process grew stronger.
Soon after his election to a second mayoral term, Moyal lost interest in the job and also in the residents. He was fed up with the shouting and the threats and the cries of despair. At low moments, he found comfort in the pleasures of the big city, Tel Aviv, taking up residence in television studios. The residents lost faith in their absentee mayor, as he had in them.
In the past two years, he sought refuge everywhere. In 2005 he considered an appointment as ambassador to France, then ran for Knesset on the Likud list. Both attempts failed, and Moyal continued seeking his future elsewhere, as far as possible from Sderot. Police inquiries into suspicions of irregularities finally broke him. A few months ago, he suspended himself, and now he has quit.