Ron Huldai

Ron Huldai: The Fighter Pilot Who Rebuilt a City

"When I became the Mayor of Tel Aviv 14 years ago, the city was on the verge of bankruptcy." Ron Huldai said that in 2013, halfway through a mayoralty that would run past a quarter of a century. By then the city had balanced its budget eleven years running and its population of eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds had doubled. He had flown in the opening strike of the Six-Day War and shot down three aircraft before he ever balanced a municipal ledger. Israelis have never entirely stopped finding the combination strange.

Kibbutz Hulda

He was born on 26 August 1944 in Kibbutz Hulda, to Jewish immigrants from Łódź in Poland. His father was one of the founders of the kibbutz and served as its school principal — a detail worth holding, because the son would end up doing the same job, on a national stage, before he entered politics.

In 1963 he joined the Israeli Air Force, and he stayed for twenty-six years.

Twenty-Six Years in the Cockpit

Huldai flew in Operation Focus, the pre-emptive air assault that opened the Six-Day War in June 1967 and destroyed the Egyptian air force largely on the ground. He flew through the War of Attrition. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973 he commanded the 201 Squadron, flying Phantoms, and shot down a MiG-21 in a dogfight over Syria. Across his career he was credited with three aerial victories.

He rose to command level and retired in 1989 with the rank of brigadier general. Along the way he accumulated an unusually eclectic education: Tel Aviv University, Auburn University in Alabama, the Air War College, and the Advanced Management Program at the Wharton School.

Between Two Careers

The years after the air force were a genuine drift. He spent a short period working in Nigeria, then managed the closure of a construction plant in Ramla — the kind of job nobody puts on a campaign poster. In 1992 he became headmaster of the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, the historic Tel Aviv high school, and ran it for six years.

That post, not the squadron, is the one that made him a politician. It put him inside the civic life of Tel Aviv, dealing with parents, budgets and the city's self-image, at exactly the moment the municipality was heading toward insolvency.

Twenty-Six Years in City Hall

He ran for mayor in 1998 as an independent and won roughly half the vote. He then won again in 2003 with 62 per cent, in 2008 with 50.6 per cent, in 2013 with 53 per cent, in 2018 with 46 per cent, and on 27 February 2024 — with Israel at war in Gaza and national turnout at 49.5 per cent — with about 51 per cent, defeating the former Yesh Atid minister Orna Barbivai on 37 per cent and Yuval Zellner on 14.

What he did with the time divides into two projects. The first was fiscal: he took a municipality on the edge of bankruptcy and produced eleven consecutive balanced budgets, which is the unglamorous precondition for everything else. The second was to decide deliberately what kind of city Tel Aviv would be, and then build it. He put money into schools and infrastructure, blanketed the city in free Wi-Fi, opened subsidised workspace for founders and pushed visa routes for foreign entrepreneurs; roughly 1,700 active technology startups now operate in a city of well under half a million people. He committed to a car-light urban form built on walking, cycling and public transit, with light rail as the spine.

He also made choices that were not merely administrative. He introduced free public bus services on Shabbat, in open defiance of the religious status quo that governs Israeli transport. He established Mesila, the municipal body that provides social services and education to African asylum seekers, at a period when national policy was moving hard the other way. He describes the governing values as "tolerance, acceptance, diversity and democracy," and he has generally been willing to pay for them.

In December 2020 he founded a centre-left national party, The Israelis, and announced he would contest the 2021 Knesset election. On 4 February 2021, eight weeks later, he announced it would not run, having failed to reach an electoral agreement with other parties.

Why Ron Is Called a Genius

The quality in question is not intellect and not creative brilliance. It is executive judgment applied continuously to one object for twenty-six years — a rarer thing than it sounds, and the reason the word gets used about him. Huldai understood something most mayors do not: that a city's finances, its physical form and its cultural identity are a single problem, not three. The eleven balanced budgets were not an accountant's vanity; they were what made it possible to fund the schools and the infrastructure, which drew the young population that doubled, which produced the density of startups, which produced the tax base. He ran that loop deliberately for a quarter of a century and it compounded. The fighter-pilot record — Operation Focus, a MiG over Syria, three kills, brigadier general — testifies to nerve and technical skill under lethal pressure, but it is a different faculty entirely and should not be counted as evidence for this one.

The counter-case is substantial. Six elections in, roughly half of Tel Aviv has voted against him every time; his 2018 result was 46 per cent, meaning a clear majority preferred someone else. Longevity of that kind is at least partly incumbency and a fragmented opposition, not proof of brilliance. His attempt to translate municipal success into national politics collapsed in eight weeks without contesting a single seat, which is a hard verdict on his political reading outside city limits. And the Tel Aviv he built — young, affluent, technological, expensive — is a city that works spectacularly for the people it attracted and is, by the design he chose, harder to afford for those who were already there. That is a defensible set of trade-offs made by a competent executive. It is not the same as genius, and Huldai, a blunt man, has never claimed it is.

Legacy

Huldai is the longest-serving mayor in Tel Aviv's history and the author of its modern identity: the "Startup City," the secular liberal counterweight to Jerusalem, the place that runs buses on Shabbat because its mayor decided it should. Whether that model survives him is the open question of Israeli municipal politics — he built it around his own authority, and after twenty-six years no one knows what the city does without him.