Backs to the wall

The country is preoccupied with the last holiday before autumn sets in, the days get long, the weather gets chilly, and everyone has to get back to work. The hiatus in hard local news allows the papers to show their true colors and focus on what interests them most.

For Israel Hayom, ever preoccupied by who will occupy the White House next, it’s the slow motion car crash that is the American presidential race. Its curtain raiser for tonight’s third and final presidential debate, which it says will be “more aggressive and flamboyant even than its predecessor,” focuses heavily on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s “scandals” in its headlines, barely mentioning that its favorite, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, is slumping in the polls. Only in passing does it refer to Trump’s own scandals involving allegations of sexual harassment of women.

The bulk of its coverage of the US elections deals with Clinton’s leaked emails, and Israel Hayom is happy to quote Trump calling the scandal “worse than Watergate,” but barely anything is reported about the Republican contender’s woes, or the fact that every poll puts him behind by a hefty margin with less than three weeks to go.

Presidential politics are not center stage in Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz, but the former headlines US President Barack Obama’s comment that Trump should “stop whining” about the elections being rigged. Haaretz runs an op-ed in which Chemi Shalev attempts to employ American football terminology in Hebrew to explain to his Israeli audience the dire straits Trump is in — “he needs a Hail Mary, that is to say a long pass with which he will win the game in the ninetieth minute.” Hate to get pedantic, Shalev, but you’re mixing sports metaphors: there are 60 minutes in a regulation football game, 90 minutes in a soccer game. He then tries to translate the metaphor to Israeli basketball terms for his readers, saying it would be four times as big as Maccabi Tel Aviv’s comeback win in 1967.

Dude, we get the point: Trump is eight over par and needs a clutch three-pointer in the bottom of the ninth when he’s got a guy in the penalty box, otherwise he doesn’t enter the next round robin.

For Yedioth Ahronoth, the plight of Israel’s workers, in this case teachers, is the issue of the day as they plan to protest outside the Education Ministry after receiving pay cuts before the holidays. At the same time, parents in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan are protesting the apparently unequal treatment of students in local schools. The children of those who shelled out extra for more after-school programming get to pet animals at the zoo and go swimming at the pool, while the kids of those who didn’t only get to hear about it. How unfair, the paper appears to exclaim in its Page 2 story on the matter, calling it “economic discrimination of students in afternoon programs run by Ramat Gan city hall.” Parents pay NIS 1,040 for the “regular” after-school program which sounds super miserable, but those who pay NIS 1,240 get “hours of enrichment in English, nature, agriculture and sports in addition to the activities taking place in the ‘regular’ after school program.”

The ongoing battle for Mosul and the anticipated Israeli state comptroller’s report on 2014’s Operation Protective Edge are the issues of greatest concern for Haaretz. In Mosul, Haaretz draws from the wires in mentioning reports that Islamic State has executed civilians who tried to flee the city. In the case of the Gaza war, the paper reports that politicians and generals alike are bracing for the outcome of the report, which will apparently include criticism of the IDF’s preparation for dealing with Hamas’s terror tunnels, and lack of coordination by the cabinet. The findings, Haaretz says, will have scathing rebukes of former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz and then-IDF intel chief Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, as well as a major impact on IDF appointments in the future.

The tabloids care more about the state comptroller’s report on transgressions by political parties in the run-up to the 2015 election and thereafter. The comptroller slapped NIS 1.85 million in fines on the Jewish Home party for misconduct surrounding a pre-election campaign rally and concert in Tel Aviv and its conduct in the Knesset. The Likud party was also fined NIS 850,000 for misconduct during the election campaign. The Joint List of Arab parties was whacked with NIS 1.23 million in fines, in part for billing 800,000 kilometers (nearly 500,000 miles) in travel. Israel Hayom, as one might expect, downplays the penalties on right wing parties, focusing instead on the transgressions of the Joint List and Yesh Atid.