Fiddling with fires while a scandal burns

It’s a damn shame that the best reporting is sometimes the most ignored. It’s hard to compete with celebrity news, listicles, death and mayhem when all you’ve got is a damning report on malfeasance that reaches into the highest strata of power, even when that damning report involves cool multi-billion shekel submarines, shady backroom deals and more bad business.

That’s the lesson of Wednesday morning’s print papers, where the tabloids sink the latest chapter in the ongoing submarine affair in favor of the sexier tale of brush fires that are flaring up across the country.

It’s not that the fires aren’t news. With at least 10 homes destroyed, hundreds of people evacuated and a massive national effort, it certainly is.

But just because something is on fire, though, doesn’t mean other burning issues should play second fiddle. Just as Nero strummed away while Rome burned, and it’s Nero’s strumming, not the burning, that is mostly remembered, so it may be that allegations of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempting to pull the strings on defense deals ends up standing the test of time, and not the blazes, which might be forgotten next week.

And so we have the broadsheet Haaretz, which while featuring a large picture caption of the fire on the top of its front page, leads off the paper with the latest twist in the labyrinthine submarine scandal, as if the paper finally smells real blood after years of trying to fell the prime minister via less sanguine scandals.

That is, if this does in fact turn out to be a scandal. The prime minister and his lawyer David Shimron deny any wrongdoing, with Shimron saying he never used his influence as a Netanyahu cohort to help push submarine or shipyard deals through.

Not so fast, says Haaretz, which reports that Shimron did stop a ship-purchase tender from going public by calling the Defense Ministry and telling them it’s what the prime minister wanted, according to a 2104 email from the ministry’s legal adviser.

The heart of the story again piggybacks on Channel 10’s muckraking, which has led the way throughout, though it’s only fair to note that Haaretz has done a fair amount of digging on the affair itself.

What it lacks in original reporting it makes up for in the frustration it expresses at the fact that Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit has lowered his periscope on opening a criminal investigation into the matter.

“It’s hard to escape the impression that ever since the appointment of Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, who answered to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his previous position as cabinet secretary, cases concerning Netanyahu have been creeping along at an excruciating pace. They wind their way from the police to the state prosecutor and back (such as the recommendation to try Sara Netanyahu for fraud in the incidents involving the prime minister’s residences), and are either not investigated at all, or only ‘examined.’ Wherever possible, Mandelblit seems determined to take his time,” the paper’s lead editorial reads. “In the past week, in his handling of the matter of attorney David Shimron and his ties with the German ThyssenKrupp shipyard, Mandelblit’s treatment of anything that has to do with Netanyahu reached a new low, one that is eroding whatever remains of the public’s trust in his integrity.”

Commentator Ido Baum piles on against Mandelblit, writing that his decision not to open an investigation “is causing hard-to-repair damage” to the state.

“From a public service standpoint, not legal, the behavior of Shimron in the submarine affair is shameful. Even if there was no criminality, the affair has exposed a failure that requires an urgent look at the conflict of interests of those around Netanyahu and his family attorney. The foot-dragging by Mandelblit and the prosecution in their decision not to open a probe worsens the shamefulness and harms public trust in the process for making decisions regarding state security,” he writes.

While mostly focused on hotter news (geddit?) both Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom do include reports on the submarine affair, buried on pages 10 and 9 respectively. Yedioth also follows up on the Channel 10 report on the email, calling it “the proof.”

Israel Hayom meanwhile, gives readers Netanyahu’s side of the story, as the Bibi-backing tabloid is wont to do, leading off its report with what it calls the prime minister’s “definitive backing of Shimron” and also detailing Netanyahu’s other responses to the affair. On top of that, the paper slyly casts doubt over Channel 10’s reporting by using loaded terms such as “claims” in place of “reports.”

Trading a sub for a hero

But who can worry about dirty deals for submersibles when the country itself is drowning in brush fires?

Israel Hayom’s front page headline “fighting for the home” refers not to Netanyahu fending off submarine-related allegations, but coverage of the fires, including one in Zichron Yaakov that managed to roast a number of houses and force 19 people to be treated for smoke inhalation.

Both Israel Hayom and Yedioth devote their first several pages to pumping up the drama, complete with Yedioth’s front page headline “Fire heroes” accompanying a pictures of firefighters and rescuers doing what they do best.

Yet accompanying the decidedly dramatic pictures of flames licking at homes, firefighters spraying water in forests and planes dropping retardant everywhere, the actual eyewitness accounts from people on the ground aren’t exactly the stuff of a Michael Bay thriller.

“When I heard about the fire on our street I hurried back from work. All the roads were blocked, I tried to reach by wife on the phone and couldn’t and I was worried because she was with the kids. One of my neighbors told me that my wife and kids managed to get out and go to a community center and they weren’t hurt,” one man is quoting telling Israel Hayom in excruciating detail. “When I saw them I calmed down, but when I got to the house I shut my eyes. The house was badly damaged and everything inside burned or melted from the heat. The furniture is ruined, all the clothes and personal things too. We will have to start from scratch. Sentimental things were also burned that no compensation will return. Pictures and albums. Our life was simply erased in a few hours.”

A quote from another victim in Yedioth treads much the same territory.

“It’s a total catastrophe,” the woman is quoted saying. “Nothing is left, everything is burnt. We don’t know what to do now … One day out of the clear blue to lose your house like this, it’s terrible.”

Finding a silver lining in the cloud of smoke rising above much of the country, the paper also reports that the fire may have been much worse if not for lessons learned in the wake of 2010 Carmel fire, which burned for days and left 44 dead.

A fire official tells the paper that after the disaster, reforms made it so all the firefighters in the country were organized through one central clearinghouse, which helped mobilize efforts to fight the blaze. On top of that, whereas firefighters used to have to find and commandeer crop dusters to use against fires, now they have 14 planes just for fighting fires that are ready to go, as well as trucks and other specialized equipment.

“If these fires had happened before the Carmel disaster, they would have also ended in a disaster,” acting fire commish Shimon Ben-Ner (whose last name translates appropriately enough to “Son of Candle”) tells the paper. “Since the Carmel disaster the way of fighting fires has totally changed.”