A lot of hot air over gas deal

A hullabaloo over Israel’s gas deal that’s more convoluted than a byzantine labyrinth takes top news in the Hebrew press on Friday, but instead of attempting to make sense out of it, the papers only make the tangle worse.

Israel Hayom, for example, refers profusely to some Article 52 which Economy Minister Aryeh Deri refused to sign on to during a cabinet meeting Thursday debating the trust-busting of the current arrangement with Delek and Nobel Energy. At no point, however, does the paper explain what this article is, or fully delineate what the matter on the table was. (The paper includes a sidebar which attempts to explain the legislation, but only muddies the waters a bit further.) Deri’s announcement left the cabinet “in shock” and dead silent, and now the government has to rejig the article in order to bypass the Shas party lawmaker, which will require sending the whole matter of Israel’s natural gas and the government’s relationship with these companies to the Knesset.

Make sense? If not, try Yedioth Ahronoth’s attempt at explaining the matter. The paper says the meeting was to vote on a proposal by the prime minister and energy minister to recognize Israel’s natural gas reserves as a strategic and security matter, and therefore push forward a compromise opposed by the anti-trust regulator. By not signing off on it, Deri scuppered the motion and sent the whole issue to a Knesset committee and the plenum, before giving the government authority to approve the deal.

But Haaretz’s main coverage deals not with the government’s relationship with these two gas companies, but with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s connection with American tycoon Sheldon Adelson. Adelson — wearing the hat of chairman of the US-Israel Business Initiative, a lobbying group which includes Nobel Energy — wrote to Netanyahu during last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip. In his three-page letter, Adelson writes that “there are huge opportunities in new economic sectors that should be seized upon and expanded,” particularly “streamlining the regulation of hydrocarbons in Israel” and “developing public support for energy development in Israel.”

A month later, the paper reports, representatives from a number of key government ministries met to discuss promoting economic ties with the United States.

In a surprising move, Yedioth Ahronoth doesn’t go anywhere near the natural gas issue in its main headlines, opting instead to write an odd piece about a religious woman who just graduated IAF pilots’ training and her meeting with the mother of the first religious woman to become a navigator, who died last year in a hiking accident in the Himalayas. Naturally, that story is made even more confusing by the fact that the pilot’s name is mentioned as R. throughout.

Yedioth Ahronoth also reports on the Hapoel Jerusalem basketball team winning the Israeli league title for the first time in its 72-year history. Hapoel Jerusalem beat Hapoel Eilat 88 to 68 to make history and win the cup, the paper reports.

The much-anticipated Gaza-bound flotilla also makes waves in the Israeli press, this being the third such attempt to break the naval blockade of the Palestinian enclave. Israel Hayom reports that organizers say “we’re determined to reach Gaza,” and that barring intervention by “a higher power or powers beneath the sea” the ships will reach the coast by Sunday.

Yedioth Ahronoth steers clear of the Gaza flotilla, but publishes a cheerful piece about how the world Jewish population has risen above that preceding the Second World War for the first time. The paper reports that there are close to 16 million Jews worldwide, just shy of the 16.6 before the Holocaust, according to a report by the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank. The report notes growth of 8% between 2005 and 2015, the highest since 1945. The bottom line, the paper says, is that after 70 years the Jewish people have succeeded in recovering.

Haaretz also reports that one of the main suspects in a major bribery case surrounding the Yisrael Beytenu party spoke regularly over the phone with Israel Police brass. Alex Wiznitzer, a close confidant of party leader Avigdor Liberman, was in regular contact with white collar crimes investigator Eran Malka, holding 49 phone calls with him between July 2013 and July 2014, the paper reports. Malka denied leaking information to Wiznitzer about the Yisrael Beytenu case, but admitted to close ties. He said the phone calls were connected to claims of corruption in the Israel Roads company, which Wiznitzer headed.