From Beirut to Stockholm

A firefight on the Lebanese border grabs headlines in the papers on Monday, but Israel also faces another threat: flu season. The newspapers report on a shootout between Israel Defense Forces soldiers and a detachment from the Lebanese Army that crossed into Israeli territory, leaving one Lebanese soldier slightly wounded.

The “exceptional” incident involved the IDF’s Golani Brigade and soldiers from the Lebanese Army who crossed the Blue Line separating Lebanon and Israel, Israel Hayom reports. Upon noticing that the Lebanese soldiers were armed, the Golani soldiers opened fire, and the Lebanese soldiers retreated to the north back into Lebanon. The paper cites the Lebanese media reporting that the Lebanese soldier was shot in the hand and suffered moderate injuries, and that the IDF crossed the border, sparking the incident.

Haaretz, on the other hand, specifies that it was members of the IDF’s elite Egoz reconnaissance unit that engaged the combatants, and that the man injured was shot in the shoulder and lightly injured. At no point, however, does Haaretz say whose soldiers crossed into Israel, merely saying “a squad.” The paper cites Lebanese media reports saying that it submitted a complaint to UNIFIL, the United Nations agency monitoring the Blue Line, and that Israel Air Force drones increased their activity along the border.

The squad that crossed the border into northern Israel could have been either Hezbollah or the Lebanese Army, says Yedioth Ahronoth, it remains unclear. In what appears to be a news piece reporting on the incident, (which has all of one line of hard information) the author says that the clash is part of a “long series of incidents in the past year on the northern border” which bear “the fingerprints of Hezbollah.”

The paper rambles on about Hezbollah for several paragraphs, and says that even though it’s tied up in Syria and Lebanon, fighting for Syrian President Bashar Assad and against Sunni radical groups, “it still succeeds in challenging Israel and changing the balance of deterrence.”

Haaretz and Israel Hayom are at sixes and sevens as to what the Swedes are actually saying about Stockholm’s recognition of Palestine as an independent state.

Haaretz reports that Sweden “isn’t backing away from its intention to recognize a state of Palestine” but that “the date for enacting such a move has yet to be set.” The paper reports that the Swedish prime minister and foreign minister spoke with Israeli Opposition leader Isaac Herzog about the matter, rather than Israel’s leaders.

“We wont recognize Palestine as a state tomorrow morning,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven is quoted saying. “We want to speak beforehand with all the relevant parties, including Israel, the Palestinians, the United States, and other states in the European Union.”

Israel Hayom, on the other hand, runs the headline “Sweden folds,” and reports that Stockholm will only recognize a Palestinian state after negotiations with Israel. It quotes the Swedish Ambassador to Israel Carl Magnus saying that there was a misunderstanding, and that recognition of a state of Palestine wouldn’t be a unilateral move by Sweden.

The paper’s perennially positive columnist, Dan Margalit, rags on the Swedes, saying they’ve been a perpetual thorn in Israel’s side since the get go. It only takes six short paragraphs for him to play the Nazi card, essentially justifying the Stern Gang’s 1948 assassination of Folke Bernadotte because of his anti-Jewish sympathies during World War II.

Yedioth Ahronoth, meanwhile, is concerned with a different threat to Israeli lives, the flu. The paper reports that the coming winter is predicted to be an “especially difficult” flu season, and Israeli hospitals are gearing up by making children miserable by giving them shots. The changing weather is being treated by health officials like an approaching “flu storm” because of the particularly nasty flu bug that ran through Australia in recent months. Health officials are calling on Israelis to go get vaccinated against the flu now, and beat the rush.

Not to bug anybody out, but Yedioth Ahronoth also publishes the results of a study that showed that the chances of someone getting sick are 10 times higher than average if they came down with the flu the year before.

Haaretz also runs an op-ed by Amos Harel in which he questions whether generals should be allowed to investigate the IDF’s conduct in this summer’s Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip. He says that “it seems that the army is gripped by an atmosphere of exaggerated satisfaction at the end of the war,” and that the top brass no longer have the “blunt field commanders” who view their superiors with skepticism and sarcasm.

He says “a civil and military inquiry into what happened this past summer is not only a historical necessity. It is particularly relevant to the next conflict.”