Cohenheads

The backlash against Finance Minister Yair Lapid continues in Hebrew-language dailies Wednesday morning, though rocket fire in the north and south, and Israel’s response, also gets top billing. If it bleeds it leads, as they say, so off we go.

Yedioth Ahronoth lumps the Gaza and Syria clashes together, seemingly ignoring the fact that the two incidents were not at all related, and in fact the Gaza rocket fire was in response to the death of a Palestinian prisoner of cancer (and not the Zionist entity kind.)

Maariv and Israel Hayom rightly make the distinction, and Haaretz doesn’t bother to mention the tensions with Gaza (the midnight strike likely just missed its deadline and the afternoon rocket attacks on Israel’s south were apparently less important than a translated New York Times story about an expensive neighborhood in London). As for the Golan, the cross-border volley only gets mentioned in the broadsheet inside a story about Syria’s daily death toll hitting a shocking 200 in March.

Maariv only affords Israeli-Gazan fire two sentences in a story about the IDF bracing for further protests in the West Bank following the prisoner’s death, with an army source telling the paper that the Palestinian Authority isn’t exactly keeping the flames from being fanned. “On one hand, we don’t identify any will by the PA to lose control, especially after Barack Obama’s visit,” the source is quoted saying. “On the other hand they don’t have any interest in containing the protests and they won’t come out from behind their fences to dispel the rioters.”

Will the real Riki Cohen please stand up?

On the other side of the Green Line, Yair Lapid may want to don his own riot gear to keep gaggles of real-life Riki Cohens from storming the gates, at least according to Yedioth, which has four (4) actual people with that name who are having a harder time than the fictional “middle-class” Riki Cohen invented by Yair Lapid to show his concern for the plight of those poor families making only NIS 20,000 a month.

“I work hard as an elderly care provider and get minimum wage, NIS 23 an hour. My husband doesn’t make more than NIS 6,000 a month,” writes one real Riki Cohen. “Twenty years we’ve paid our mortgage; to make NIS 20,000 a month is a wet dream for us. We are trying to make it to the end of the month despite the high cost of living and just not to drown.… I’m not able, unlike Yair Lapid, to go to the supermarket and take what I want. I’m drowning in debt. With all due respect, Lapid needs to climb down from the limb he’s gone out on, and he still wants to cut the little social security left for people.”

Haaretz, noting that Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer jumped into the fray against Lapid yesterday by saying the poor also need to be looked after, reports that the number of families with two working parents below the poverty line has doubled: “A look at impoverished households paints a worrisome picture: While a decade ago 3.9 percent of such households had two wage earners, one in ten poor families now have two wage earners. Overall, there are approximately 441,000 impoverished families, representing 20 percent of all households in Israel.”

Where you at?

Israel Hayom writes about an Israeli MacGyver who used his noggin, his smartphone and the Whatsapp application to find two hikers lost in the Ramon Crater earlier this week. The two trekkers, wandering through the Negev wilderness without any water, managed to contact a cop, who got them to send their coordinates via the app. “Dahan [the cop] said that the idea came to him when his wife lost her way and he helped her via the application,” the paper reports.

In Yedioth, Yoaz Hendel opines that both sides of the Riki Cohen fiasco need to take a deep breath and step back. “Shas MKs, with their expensive suits and fat salaries, can easily discount the imagined Riki Cohen — but she is real. Lapid, for his part, needs to pay attention to the truths behind the criticism…”

Haaretz’s editorial page, meanwhile, does what it does best and takes the Israel Defense Forces to task for pulling reserve soldiers from their homes during Passover to guard an illegal outpost in the West Bank. “The IDF can’t be a substitute for a security company, nor protect people who make up their own rules. There’s no reason for reserve soldiers to have to part with their families and abandon their businesses to guard mobile homes belonging to people who chose to erect them on land that isn’t theirs, in contravention of orders issued by the same army that must deal with this absurdity.”