Commemoration interrupted

An Israeli newspaper editor’s conundrum: It’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, but the first real altercation between Israel and Hamas in a while is taking place along the border of the Gaza Strip. At the same time, a senior IDF officer makes a remark that appears to compare Israel to pre-war Germany. Which takes priority?

Hamas fired mortars at IDF soldiers who were hunting and destroying terror tunnels burrowed beneath Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip in what was apparently an incidental coincidence with the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. The army responded with airstrikes targeting Hamas installations near the southern city of Rafah. Both sides warned each other against further escalations.

Now ordinarily such events — the first real exchange of fire between the two sides since the summer 2014 Gaza war — would steal the spotlight in the morning papers, but Holocaust memorial ceremonies and speeches trump all.

For Haaretz the answer is dividing its front page between Gaza airstrikes and the torch-lighting at Yad Vashem. Israel Hayom, all too predictably, throws its front page behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu’s address for Holocaust Remembrance Day, devoting a small headline below to the cross-border exchange with Hamas and ignoring the deputy chief staff’s comment that he finds it frightening to “identify horrifying processes that occurred in Europe… in our midst.” Yedioth Ahronoth, loath to draw attention away from its Holocaust features, runs a barely noticeable headline at the bottom about Gaza, but gives greatest prominence to Maj. Gen. Yair Golan’s incendiary remark at Wednesday night’s ceremony at Yad Vashem.

Israel Hayom’s takeaway from President Reuven Rivlin’s Holocaust Remembrance Day speech reinforces the paper’s worldview, particularly in light of renewed violence with Hamas. “We will forever defend ourselves, by ourselves,” the president said, and Israel Hayom runs it as its headline. Like Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel Hayom’s Holocaust coverage focuses on the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors serving in the IDF with tropes such as “You are our victory [over the Nazis]” and “I’m here for grandpa.”

Golan’s speech is digested differently by the various Hebrew papers as well. Haaretz calls it “unusual” but otherwise doesn’t comment on the contents of the deputy chief of staff’s remarks and merely reports his words. Israel Hayom, on the other hand, buries Golan’s comments several pages below those of the chief of staff, president and prime minister that same evening, and scolds the general: “specifically on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day — a controversy-stirring speech.” The paper’s pundits don’t weigh in, but Israel Hayom quotes Education Minister Naftali Bennett condemning Golan.

Yedioth Ahronoth describes in its reportage that “before the eyes of Holocaust survivors and public persons the deputy chief of staff calls for national soul searching.” The paper’s commentators don’t necessarily agree with what Golan said (or the manner in which he said it), but as Yoaz Hendel writes on Thursday, he embodied an Israeli value of “leading and not being dragged along” — not being afraid to say the unpopular.

Yossi Yehoshua says that Golan’s statement was “problematic,” and that he didn’t think it through before opening his mouth, but doesn’t outright disagree with the general.

“The comparison to the Holocaust, in its timing and the place in which it was said — will only earn him criticism and muffle the criticism he gave,” he writes.

He finds it amusing to see the left embrace and the right reject the General Staff’s “most militant” officer, “the man who wanted to continue and conquer the [Gaza] Strip and wasn’t satisfied with the results of [Operation Protective Edge in 2014].”

Shockingly, Haaretz and Israel Hayom’s military affairs opinionators agree on one thing: Hamas’s unprecedented mortar fire on IDF troops since 2014 appears to be “an attempt by Hamas to indicate red lines to Israel, in light of the IDF’s efforts to find attack tunnels the group has dug under the border into Israeli territory,” Haaretz’s Amos Harel writes.

When Israel Hayom eventually deals with the IDF’s exchange of fire with Hamas, its military pundit Yoav Limor says what everybody is thinking: “It’s going to be a hot summer down south.”

But Limor sounds like he’s preaching a self-fulfilling prophecy: “The escalation [of hostilities] in the Gaza Strip was written on the wall, as the cliche goes. The IDF is prepared for it, Hamas is prepared for it, and all of this without either side really wanting it.”

“On the face of it, the escalation is limited, which teaches that both sides aren’t interested in broadening [hostilities],” Limor writes, but points out that the conditions in the Gaza Strip are riper now for renewed conflict than they were in 2014: higher unemployment, lower GDP per capita, tens of thousands homeless, and so on and so forth.

“Israel is aware of the possible consequences of its recent operations, but it would appear that it can’t not eliminate the threat if it identifies tunnels already excavated into its territory,” Harel writes.

Nonetheless, he says that “the fire is still a warning sign, not an invitation to total war.”