JERUSALEM, May 8 (UPI) -- Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a former Israeli Labor party chairman, returned to the post of minister of National Infrastructures in a ceremony in Jerusalem on Sunday, saying that alternative energy would be one of the priorities of his coming term.
The ceremony was one of several Sunday, held at various ministries around the capital, to usher in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's new government.
"Alternative energy will to straight onto" the national agenda," Ben-Eliezer, who is known in Israel by his nickname, Fuad, told ministry employees and reporters at the ceremony.
He also stressed the importance of natural gas and water technology to Israel's future. According to ministry spokesmen, Fuad plans to publicly expand on his agenda in the coming weeks, after he's had a chance to "settle in" to the post.
During his previous term as national infrastructures minister, Ben-Eliezer made several public statements in which he supported alternative energy. On an August 2005 tour of the Solel headquarters in Beit Shemesh, he enthused about the company's construction of Israel's first solar thermal power plant in the Negev Desert.
"Renewable technology like this can lead a revolution in the energy market ... and so, a solar power station will be established in the Negev and in the first stage it will comprise 2,000 dunams," or 500 acres, Fuad announced at the end of the tour, according to a ministry statement.
Fuad was born in Iraq and immigrated to Israel in 1950. This is his seventh time serving as a government minister.
His other posts included a stint as housing and construction minister from 1992 to 1996, and as communications minister from 1999 to 2001. When Labor joined then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unity government in March of 2001, Ben-Eliezer took the defense portfolio, and served as defense minister until late October 2002, when he pulled the Labor party out of the government.
Proving that nothing ever really changes in Israeli politics, one of Fuad's notable actions as defense minister was to order the dismantling of illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank, according to a profile of the politician in the Ha'aretz daily newspaper.
He left his most recent post as minister of national infrastructures about five months ago, when Sharon left the Likud party to found Kadima. The move effectively dissolved the government and spurred the March 28 elections.
In the interim, Kadima minister Roni Bar-On, a close friend of Fuad's, held the national infrastructures portfolio.
Bar-On, in handing the portfolio back to Ben-Eliezer, said that national infrastructures was the ministry for which Fuad had prepared, and which he chose -- it didn't fall on him as a last-choice option.
"I'm proud to return," Fuad said. "And I hope everyone is happy -- though I'm not sure," he joked.
Not everyone is. The groan of disappointment was practically audible the Ha'aretz daily's April 25 commentary by Guy Rolnik: "The big bang" -- the political earthquake Sharon caused by forming Kadima -- "is about to end in a feeble whimper. They're back - Fuad ... (and) the whole crew we know so very well.
"These are people who led us over the last 20 years to where we are now: Our economy is one of the most backward in the world, in terms of GDP per capita growth, and exploitation of potential," Rolnik continued.
However, the national infrastructures ministry's director-general, Eli Ronen, voiced support for Fuad's return. "I think we'll continue to work together," Ronen told the Jerusalem gathering.
And work is what they'll have to do, Fuad said. "There are hard days ahead of this government," he said.
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