It’s mourning in Israel

Israel is a country of some 8 million souls, but sometimes it likes to remind you that it still thinks of itself as a small town, especially when it comes to matters of family and military. Case in point, a soldier being hospitalized after collapsing during training would not warrant a single column inch in the US press. In Israel, every major Hebrew-language news outlet put out a push notification when it happened this week (after faithfully abiding by the censor’s rules to avoid publishing anything until the family was informed).

Similarly, in the US, a helicopter training accident crash that kills a pilot might make a brief in a national publication, with the fact that “a relative” of an injured co-pilot was once killed in an air crash left out as mostly irrelevant. In Israel, the stories are on the front page of the country’s largest circulation dailies for two days running, filled with tales of angst and pain and many questions.

In the US, killed pilot David Zohar would be a stranger. In Israel, he’s somebody the papers’ readers care about (or at least the papers think).

That culture is certainly behind giving the story immense play, though one can see why both Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom might want to give a combined 14 pages of coverage to the chopper crash.

For Israel Hayom, anything that pushes the disastrous legal troubles Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family off the front page is fair game.

Yedioth, meanwhile, discovers that Zohar played a Forrest Gump-esque role in its archives, starring in a picture it ran just a few months ago of Zohar’s grandmother, her arm tattooed with numbers from Auschwitz, waving at her grandson as his helicopter passes overhead, which the paper runs again on its front page, this time under the headline “The sky has fallen.”

“If i caused her to feel pride, I’m proud of that,” the paper quotes Zohar saying at the time in reaction to the picture taken by his uncle.

That wasn’t Zohar’s only starring moment, and both Yedioth and Israel Hayom run pictures of Zohar on set Monday afternoon as he filmed an internal video for Elbit, where he worked. His happy face is juxtaposed next to the more downcast faces of those he left behind, reflecting the doleful coverage.

“The family still hasn’t absorbed the terrible tragedy,” a friend is quoted telling Yedioth. “Dudi was the best of the best, and the whole country should thank him.”

Israel Hayom leads off its coverage with a quote from his brother Shaul eulogizing him as “larger than life. You won’t find anyone like him.”

The paper also devotes space to the other air tragedy, of the family of the injured co-pilot, under the headline “My son went on a flight and didn’t come back and now my grandson is also injured,” spoken by grandmother Rivka Gutterman. Gutterman tells the paper that the link between her grandson, who is identified only as A., and David Zohar runs deeper than Monday’s crash (hence the front page headline “linked in blood”).

“My son, Tomer Gutterman, was a great pilot. The killed pilot, David Zohar, named his son after my son, Tomer. They were good friends,” she’s quoted saying.

Haaretz skips over the personal stuff and focuses on what caused the crash, joining with the other two papers in zeroing in on the nine minutes between when a problem was reported and when the chopper smashed into the ground at Ramon Air Force Base in southern Israel.

“Something went wrong during the landing,” the paper quotes an unnamed senior IAF official in the understatement of the day. “What went wrong and how did it go wrong? That’s why we have an investigation.”

Shedding a bit more light on the issue, the paper reports that an initial probe has found that there was a problem with the tail rotor, “which was working, but which they did not have control over.”

The broadsheet, though, is more concerned with shedding light on the corruption scandals wracking the country. While Netanyahu’s legal woes stay in the spotlight — including a front-page story on Ari Harow getting a boatload of money from Netanyahu supporters when he left his job as the prime minister’s aide — the paper’s lead story is on charges brought against former deputy interior minister Faina Kirschenbaum and other senior Yisrael Beytenu people, accused of “systematic corruption,” in the words of the headline.

In an accompanying column, investigative reporter Gidi Weitz calls the case one of the biggest corruption scandals in the country’s history, though he also alleges that it is not unique.

“All these cases demonstrate an ingrained culture of corruption at the public’s expense. The amazing thing is that these are not isolated cases, they’re not just a few rotten apples,” he writes. “Corruption is an industry encompassing dozens of people, including those very high up in government, people within the party machines, consultants, counsels and lobbyists. And, sometimes, people who are not seasoned criminals at all, but just normal law-abiding citizens who found themselves sinking into the mud because they thought, ‘Cosi fan tutte’ – ‘Everybody does it.’”

That feeling is also illustrated by the comic on Yedioth’s op-ed page, showing a crowded airport and a man remarking that “it’s crowded here like the Lahav 433 anti-fraud police investigations unit.” (And it’s missing from israel Hayom, which runs a large editorial on the importance of caring for street cats.)

Also on Yedioth’s op-ed page, Amnon Abramovich (the journalist who originally advised treating Ariel Sharon as a shielded “etrog,” a metaphor that suddenly popped up all over the place in Tuesday’s papers), now advises activists and others to stop yelling at Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and let him do his job, giving him more credit than others have extended the man who was once cabinet secretary under Netanyahu.

“Quit harassing Mandelblit. He’ll decide based on the evidentiary material and not on yelling from the street,” he writes. “I predict that the Netanyahu era is close to being over. I doubt it will end in prison. More likely after he ends his term he’ll be the first prime minister in the country’s history to move away.”