Lights, camera, action?

A solution for the latest round of violence between Israel and the Palestinians may be as simple as point and click. US Secretary of State John Kerry announced Saturday a series of moves that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed to, including an agreement to install CCTV cameras on the Temple Mount to record what’s going on at the flashpoint holy site.

Jordan says the cameras will be able to ensure that Israel isn’t making any changes to the status quo and that it isn’t trying to damage the mosque atop the site. A senior Israeli official tells Haaretz that the installation of security cameras on the Temple Mount will allow it to disprove such claims: “Israel is interested in showing that the provocations are not coming from its end.”

Adopting an optimistic stance, Yedioth Ahronoth hails the announcement, saying “it would appear that finally a way to stop the violence has been found.” While Israel agreed to Jordan’s proposal of video surveillance of the site, it also reaffirmed the Hashemite Kingdom’s role as administrator of the Temple Mount complex and agreed to meetings between Israeli and Jordanian Waqf officials to strengthen ties and understanding, the paper notes.

Israel Hayom’s takeaway from the announcement is that Kerry got agreements from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah II of Jordan about easing tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, and that “There is no change concerning ascent of Jews to the Temple Mount,” as the paper’s headline reads.

The paper quotes Jewish Home MK Yinon Magal saying that “I appreciate the efforts of the prime minister to calm the situation, but at the end of the day nothing will prevent Jews from praying on the Temple Mount. Not even cameras of the Waqf,”

First fiddle in Israel Hayom goes to its coverage of a family attacked by a Molotov cocktail Friday; the mother survived a stabbing in the Gaza Strip 21 years ago and she and her children “miraculously survived” this attack in the West Bank.

“We were already turning into Beit El,” Sigal Sofer tells Israel Hayom. “Suddenly there was a noise, glass and fire, and I saw that our daughter, three-year-old Tahel, was burning. The fire took hold of her seat and her dress.” She recounts to the paper that the family of five quickly exited the vehicle and the mother grabbed the daughter, stripped her of her burning clothing and rushed her to the hospital, where she’s expected to recover from her burns.

“The family has no small amount of luck,” the paper reports.

Netanyahu makes a last-minute move to push off a Knesset vote on a Jewish State bill and effectively “bury” the controversial legislation for “an unclear period of time,” Yedioth Ahronoth reports. The paper quotes sources close to Likud MK Avi Dichter, who proposed the bill which was supposed to go before a Knesset committee Sunday, saying that striking the bill from the agenda was “a badge of shame for the nationalist camp and and everyone who demands recognition of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people.” Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman also knocked the move, saying it was “additional proof of the fact that this is a government which poses as a nationalist government but has no connection whatsoever to the principles of the nationalist camp — not security, not in policy and not in legislation.”

The report said that the US closely monitored Israeli airbases and listened in on its communications in 2012, fearing a strike on Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility. “Nerves frayed at the White House after senior officials learned Israeli aircraft had flown in and out of Iran in what some believed was a dry run for a commando raid on the site. Worried that Israel might ignite a regional war, the White House sent a second aircraft carrier to the region and readied attack aircraft,” the paper reported, citing an American official.

Haaretz doesn’t run any response to the report from Israeli officials.

Israeli author David Grossman goes after the prime minister in a full-page op-ed in Yedioth Ahronoth over Netanyahu’s Hitler-mufti comment last week. He accuses Netanyahu of manipulating Holocaust history and the Israeli public through “brilliant rhetorical skill.” He says Netanyahu “mixes and blends the true dangers that Israel faces with the reverberations and trauma of the Holocaust.”

“Israel is a state of refugees of a great disaster, a trauma-afflicted society” which is “powerless against the sophisticated manipulations worked against us by our prime minister,” he writes.

“But the emotional and cognitive mechanism exposed to everyone by Netanyahu’s statement about the mufti and Hitler tells us in a short and most terrifying way that the policy of the State of Israel, and its character and future, are articulated and determined now, more than ever, by the small and hermetically sealed space between Benjamin Netanyahu the man and the covered and sealed lenses of his binoculars. There we’re trapped, there our future is determined, and there we’re being brought, with eyes wide shut.”