Disconnect inferno

Yair Lapid may be a near-political rookie, but the former journalist knows the media hungers for nothing more than a neat story to package news events — and he gave them that Wednesday night with a scathing attack on the prime minister, perfectly timed to land him on both prime time television and the front pages of Israel’s newspaper the next morning.

Lapid’s sharp-tongued speech, in which the recently fired finance minister accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being disconnected, disconnected, disconnected and disconnected, aimed to place his scowling face in the public eye as the main foil to Netanyahu’s bid for a fourth term leading the country, at least for now.

Lapid also competes for front page real estate with the Knesset decision to set elections for March 17, a terror attack at a West Bank supermarket, and in Yedioth Ahronoth’s case, a series of never before published photos from the Har Nof synagogue attack last month.

Lapid’s “you are disconnected” slogan gets headline treatment in all three papers, though Israel Hayom, known for being aligned with Netanyahu, doesn’t play his comments quite as large as the other two.

In Yedioth, Sima Kadmon says Lapid knows better than most about Netanyahu, since he served as a senior minister under him, but she wonders: If the prime minister was so terrible, why didn’t he quit earlier instead of waiting to be fired?

“This raises and justifies the question of what Lapid and [also fired justice minister Tzipi] Livni were doing until now. If this is how the prime minister acts, and this your stance toward him, why did you wait for him to fire you? This is a list in which every element deserves an investigative commission, and it would be normal to lose sleep over them, if these defects detailed by Lapid yesterday truly occurred in the most important bureau on the country and in the most exclusive and secret forums.”

In Israel Hayom, Haim Schein estimates that Lapid’s barn-burner address signaled that the center-left, in a “crisis,” will focus on mudslinging in its campaign.

Schein, though, engages in a bit of the dirty work himself, joining in Netanyahu’s accusation that Lapid tried to engineer an overthrow of the prime minister and dragging former president Shimon Peres into the affair as well.

“People who saw in Lapid great promise have already disconnected from him. His stinking maneuver didn’t work and Lapid is left without a king or a rook. In maneuvers like this, he needed to speak to Peres before, not after. It’s possible that soon Peres will be leading Yesh Atid’s election campaign,” he writes, making reference to a failed attempt by Peres to engineer a joint left-ultra-Orthodox coup behind the back of Yitzhak Shamir in 1991, also called “the stinking maneuver.”

Lapid has vociferously denied he intended any such power play, but Haaretz reports that with the door wide open for politicians to form new alliances, he may be lining up ducks for a center-right coalition to try to defeat Netanyahu.

The paper, giving a rundown of what the various parties are up to now that election season is in full swing, cites Yesh Atid sources saying that a “new channel” is being hooked up between their party, former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon’s nascent and unnamed party, and Yisrael Beytenu, which ran in league with Likud last time around

All three parties deny the claim and the paper warns it’s not clear what shape the love triangle would take, but still says such an alliance is not the stuff of fantasy.

“A link between Lapid and [Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor] Liberman is nothing new. The two decided to work together on the eve of the winter Knesset session to push through the religion and state bill, though their bid failed.”

In the paper’s op-ed page, Ari Shavit makes an impassioned plea for politicians to distance themselves from the massive spin that characterized the last campaign in 2013, which he says pushed parties with no ideological mooring into power, to everyone’s detriment.

Calling Netanyahu, Lapid and Jewish Home head Naftali Bennett “three conservative white men,” he complains that they “loathed each other from the day the government was formed to the day it croaked. They didn’t agree on anything and didn’t do anything. Instead, from morning to night they were busy with positioning themselves. This is why the political, economic and social management faltered. This is why none of the cabinet’s ministers worked seriously on the issues at hand with the others. The television and Facebook talents did what talents know how to do – advance themselves, instead of serving the general good.”

Return to terror

Lest you were worried that all the fighting is taking place in the political arena, a terror attack on a shopping center in the West Bank Wednesday afternoon snapped the media back to the harsh and violent reality that dominated news coverage just a few weeks ago.

Israel Hayom gushes over the off-duty security guard who shot the attacker in the leg, and notes that he was only able to take his gun home from his day job of guarding Netanyahu in the wake of a move by the Public Security Ministry to ease gun control rules after a series of terror attacks last month.

“I did my duty,” the guard is quoted telling the paper. “I thank whoever kept a cool head and helped me neutralize the terrorist.”

That attack ended with only two injured, but Yedioth transports readers back to a much darker day last month with previously unpublished pictures of a terror attack on a Jerusalem synagogue that left five dead.

In the series of six photos, some of them gruesome (the bloody front page choice definitely fails the breakfast test), a badly injured man is seen lying in front of the prayer hall as police prepare to enter. The photos then show two terrorists emerge with guns and knives and a shootout with police, in which one cop and both assailants are killed.

“My son woke me up a few minutes before 7 and said he heard shots from the synagogue and people running from there,” amateur photographer Zahar Ross, who took the pictures from his balcony across the street, tells the paper. “I ran to my balcony and the first thing I saw was Shmuel Goldstein running and screaming ‘there’s a massacre.’ I told my wife to call the police and I grabbed my camera.”