Carrots and divining rods

With two weeks left until the American elections, just two weeks until we can put ourselves out of the misery that is this presidential race, the Hebrew tabloids gear up for the final battle to come. At the same time the papers on Tuesday digest comments made by Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman to a Palestinian newspaper about the Gaza Strip.

Liberman’s interview with the Al-Quds newspaper caught the Israeli press off guard not only because it was published on the third long holiday weekend of October, but because of his apparent turnaround vis-a-vis Hamas and the Gaza Strip. Sure it contained the familiar bluster and saber-rattling, but it also included a trade-off: if Hamas gives up its tunnels and rockets, Israel will agree to the building of a seaport and airport in the Gaza Strip. Israel Hayom, keeping with its agenda, focuses on the stick. “Liberman threatens: If Hamas starts another round of fighting — we’ll destroy them,” reads the paper’s headline, projecting the same old Liberman that its readers know. But the headlines in Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth instead underscore the ultra-nationalist hawk’s carrot. “Liberman: If Hamas stops arming and digging tunnels, we’ll agree to a seaport and airport in Gaza,” Haaretz says. Yedioth Ahronoth runs with “Liberman: Gaza could be Singapore.”

The fact that Liberman denounced Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas publicly for not being serious about peace with Israel doesn’t cause too many waves on the Israeli side.

Hamas hasn’t responded to Liberman’s comments, Haaretz notes, but on social media Palestinians ragged on the paper for being “the media of normalization with Israel and the occupation.” Fatah party officials tell the paper that the defense minister’s interview was another example of his policy of delegitimizing Abbas and making comments to prevent future ties between the Gaza Strip and West Bank. “Liberman wants Hamas to continue ruling in the Gaza Strip as a political movement and harm the position of Abbas in the West Bank, and thus bury any possibility of a future political agreement based on the two-state solution,” an unnamed Fatah party official tells the paper.

Israel Hayom reports that Hamas did in fact respond by rejecting Liberman’s remarks and that the Gaza government’s propaganda ministry insinuated it would block the newspaper from being let into the Gaza Strip.

“The Palestinian people deserve to have a seaport and airport without being extorted by the rulers of the occupation,” it quotes Hamas saying. “The tunnels, the missiles and the rest of the arms are legitimate means of resistance to the occupation and the repeated and recurring attacks by Israel.”

“This is essentially the first time that he speaks about building strategic infrastructure like this in the Strip and clarifies that a seaport and airport are on the docket,” Yedioth Ahronoth’s Yossi Yehoshua writes. But the real bottom line, he argues, is that Liberman doesn’t like Abbas, doesn’t want to deal with him, and that “it’s pretty clear from his comments that so long as Abbas is in power, the Palestinians won’t get anything.” Yehoshua contends that the price for alleviating the blockade on the Gaza Strip is too high for Hamas, which “will continue to dig [tunnels] full steam ahead and carry out rocket tests at sea in broad daylight — and oppose Israel.”

But while Liberman’s remarks make local political fodder, the final leg of the US presidential election remains bread and butter reporting. “Two more weeks,” Israel Hayom reminds its readers on the front page, but doesn’t go so far as Sheldon Adelson’s other paper in outright endorsing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Israelis, it’s said, are known for their subtlety.

Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea is in Philadelphia reporting on the presidential race from a Democratic rally, but spends much of his column whining about the autumn temperatures in the northeast. “We stood four hours in 10° Celsius (50°F) cold — not something a Middle Eastern journalist is used to,” he writes. I’m sorry, was that -10° C? No, a balmy 10 degrees above freezing, not something to kvetch about. Once he thawed out his ballpoint, Barnea gets to his point. “The warm-up act included a few politicians who talked about Trump (‘Boooo!’ cried the crowd, ‘boooo!’),” he reports. “There was a band; there wasn’t heating.”

Somebody give this guy a Pulitzer and a cup of hot cocoa before November sets in, please.

Haaretz reports that US President Barack Obama “won’t be satisfied with Trump’s defeat” and has hit the campaign trail to stick it to the Republican Party as a whole.