Model behavior

Yet another sexual harassment scandal is on the front page as yet another Likud party lawmaker is in the hot seat, with a second former employee stepping forward with allegations of abuse. But what really grabs headlines in the tabloids is the investigation of an unnamed but unmistakable Israeli supermodel on tax evasion charges. What’s bizarre is that the woman’s face, which usually graces most publications, TV ads and sides of buildings, is conspicuously absent — blurred out on the front page.

The “well known model,” whose blonde hair and familiar figure bear a striking resemblance to those of Bar Refaeli, spent 13 hours in questioning under suspicion by Israeli tax authorities for alleged irregularities, Yedioth Ahronoth reports. Israel Hayom notes that “the exact details about the reason for the model’s summoning isn’t clear, but her fortune is estimated to be in the millions of shekels, which she earned over the course of the years in dozens of known campaigns.” (Only a later edition of Yedioth shows Refaeli’s name and face and says that she’s suspected of evading over NIS 1 million in taxes).

Israel Hayom notes that the model (whose name it doesn’t print) joints a long list of Israeli celebrities and entertainers who’ve been investigated by the tax authorities, including singers Eyal Golan, Moshe Peretz and Kobi Peretz.

Haaretz leads with the sexual harassment allegations against Interior Minister Silvan Shalom by a second former employee, following its report a day earlier on an ex-worker’s charges against the senior Likud party official. The paper notes that the second woman made her claims public in a Channel 10 report, but that she wouldn’t be pressing charges with the police.

(Update: The allegations against Shalom were not substantiated and a police investigation was subsequently closed.)

Israel Hayom, however, appears to leap to the defense of the embattled Likud minister, reporting that the police said that they haven’t received any new complaints against the minister, and so long as there aren’t any they won’t open an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment. Despite the two new claims against Shalom, and the one which surfaced in March 2014 when he threw his hat in the ring for the position of president, the paper quotes the interior minister saying that the two women who spoke to the press in recent days were “recycling stories which were investigated and closed by the attorney general, the state and the police.”

MKs Zehava Galon, Tamar Zandberg and Michal Rozin of the Meretz party called on Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to instruct the police to call Shalom in for questioning, regardless of the lack of a formal complaint against the minister, Haaretz reports.

Weinstein is expected to ask the police to open an inquiry into the allegations at the insistence of the MKs and women’s rights groups, Yedioth Ahronoth reports. The paper cites legal sources saying that the testimony provided by the two women who’ve stepped forward in recent days are already familiar to the police and therefore the odds of a criminal case against Shalom are currently fairly low.

Should one of the women decide to press charges and cooperate with police investigators, however, Weinstein will be forced to instruct the police to open a criminal investigation into the allegations against Shalom, the paper says.

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu getting into a shouting match in the Knesset over Breaking the Silence and nasty words about President Reuven Rivlin also generates a buzz in the press. The discussion in parliament was supposed to be about the recent poverty report, but the plenum quickly descended into recriminations.

Herzog took the podium and called on Netanyahu to denounce incitement against Rivlin after right-wing extremists called him a traitor, among other things. Netanyahu, in turn, got up and called on Herzog to denounce Breaking the Silence, a group which gathers IDF soldiers’ testimony about serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

What the two things have to do with one another, or what either have to do with the rise in poverty in Israel, is a mystery. The press has a field day with the dramatic scene in the Knesset, which involved a back and forth of shouting, with the Knesset Speaker turning off the microphone and criticizing lawmakers for acting like a classroom of unruly high school students.