On Iran, no news is no excuse

After a long weekend, Hebrew-language newspapers are back, with Iran-linked headlines once again taking up prime A1 real estate. But readers might be scratching their heads wondering where the news is, considering the fact that the stories contain little in the way of anything but essentially the same old squabbling over the deal newswatchers have been seeing for the last couple weeks, if not more.

Perhaps it was the fact that the only other apparent news was politicians’ yearly glad-handing for the festival of Mimouna that led editors to decide that yes, Iran will remain the top headline, even if the associated news is a bit of a stretch.

Israel Hayom does the least to pretend it is offering readers something new, running nearly the same exact headline it did last week: “The battle moves to the Senate” (last week it was “the battle moves to Congress”).

The paper leads off with the non-news news that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will vote on whether to okay a high-stakes bill demanding congressional oversight over an Iran deal. The paper picks up on a smattering of US reports, including one from Politico that Florida senator Marco Rubio is considering adding a rider to the bill that would demand any deal include Iranian recognition of Israel, which is as much a nonstarter in Foggy Bottom as it is in Tehran.

Boaz Bismuth’s column in the paper is similarly filled with half-news, such as one long passage on the importance of the veto-killing 67 votes. And in a move unlikely to win him many friends in the GOP, he goes ahead and acknowledges that some are comparing Senate Foreign Relations Committee head Bob Corker to the Iranian foreign minister.

“While the debate this week will be internally American, there are cynics in Washington who saw the Republican senator from Tennessee will be tough on the government no less than [Mohammed Javad] Zarif. The problem is that Corker is stuck in a trap of sorts,” he writes. “One the one hand, he wants a bill that will attack the government and leave it immobilized. On the other hand, he needs to be flexible if he wants to win over the support of his Democratic colleagues in order to gain a veto-blocking majority.”

Haaretz leads off with a story that the sum of all Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fears are that Iran will actually comply with the nascent nuclear agreement, thus lulling the world into complacency in the face of the mullah menace.

The paper cites two unnamed Israeli official in reporting that Netanyahu told his cabinet of this fear at a hastily arranged security cabinet meeting on April 3, just hours before the Passover seder.

“Netanyahu said at the meeting that it would be impossible to catch the Iranians cheating simply because they will not break the agreement,” one official is quoted as saying in the article, which reads like it could have been written by George Orwell or Franz Kafka.

Raviv Drucker, a TV journalist and prominent Netanyahu critic, pens a scathingly sarcastic criticism of Netanyahu and his Iran deal-bashing cronies in the broadsheet’s op-ed section, bitingly lampooning Jerusalem’s insistence that it could get a better deal with Iran (though to be fair, Drucker is seemingly setting up a straw man argument, since Netanyahu and others only said a better deal could be had, not that they necessarily could reach it):

“If they only let us, the Israelis, manage the talks, we would get a totally different result,” he writes. “Look how we finished off our various talks in the last years. How we brought Hamas to its knees in negotiations over the release of Gilad Shalit and freed only a thousand terrorists for him. If only Obama would learn from us.”

A glance at Yedioth Ahronoth reveals that the tabloid didn’t get the memo to skip over Mimouna and go back to the future with Iran. Instead the paper fills its front page with a mufleta clutching of President Reuven Rivlin next to a friend dressed up in his Moroccan best and celebrating the traditional post-Passover feast (expect the picture to pop back up in a bid to make him look silly whenever he gets embroiled in some scandal), accompanied by the news that the last days of Passover were marked by an unseasonable late-spring winter storm this year.

On the news front, the paper does pull out its time machine, traveling into the slight future to give wall to wall coverage of Hillary Clinton (finally) announcing her 2016 presidential run, as she is expected to do Sunday.

“Now it’s her turn,” reads the paper’s headline on the story, which seems like it could have been written at Clinton 2016 headquarters and all but goes ahead and gives her the White House.

“Already now, even before she announced, all the surveys show Clinton defeating any rival in the Democratic primary, and after that any Republican who runs against her,” the paper reports. “If she is elected, she won’t just be the first female president and the only president whose husband also held the post, but also the oldest president to enter the White House, after Ronald Reagan who was elected at age 70.”

While the US ramps up for its own succession battle two years hence, Israel is still in the midst of intense negotiations over the cobbling together of a new coalition, which is expected to pick back up in earnest Sunday after a week of matza munching and camel riding for Passover.

Haaretz reports that Netanyahu is expected to push forward with ministerial appointments this week, though his efforts at getting all the sides to join have been stymied by demands from Jewish Home and Kulanu that Likud considers excessive.

“Netanyahu will have to make meaningful decisions regarding ministerial appointments at the beginning of next week, or else the negotiations won’t go anywhere,” the paper quotes a Likud source saying. The report adds that “Likud sources say that neither party is currently prepared to be more flexible due to their assessment that Netanyahu cannot build a coalition without them.”

But Haaretz editor Aluf Benn surmises that Netanyahu doesn’t necessarily need them as he can still turn to dovish rival Zionist Union for a national unity government that would sideline the smaller parties and their demands. Benn envisions a nightmarish scenario in which Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home is a senior coalition partner and the country is turned into a bastion of right-wing values where peaceniks and critics are silenced into submission.

Or, he writes, Netanyahu can choose the “moderate” path, which will allow him to remain in power but put the brakes on any large government reforms, which would get tied up in intercoalitional gridlock.

“If Netanyahu goes with Herzog’s Zionist Union instead, he would radiate a conservative foreign policy focused on maintaining ‘stability’ from within and stopping pressure from without. Such a unity government would be hard-put to foment revolution, since its components would cancel each other out,” he writes. “The decision that Netanyahu makes – Herzog or Bennett – will mainly make clear how he wishes to govern in the next term: as a revolutionary or as a conservative.”

Haaretz may be over Passover, but the tragedies that struck Israelis abroad and at home over the holiday, including deaths in Germany, Peru, near Thailand and apparently in the Sea of Galilee, where a soldier is missing, still stick with Yedioth Ahronoth.

While the last paper published Thursday still held out hope that 12-year-old Shani Maril would be found alive after the boat she was on in the Andaman Sea caught fire and sank, Sunday’s paper reports on the horror of the Modiin family that lost their daughter in the tragedy.

“From an investigation it seems that Shani went down to the bathroom of the boat next to where the fire broke out,” the paper reports. “The bathroom is located very close to the engine of the boat where the fire broke out, and travelers testified that they heard the Israeli father screaming the name of his daughter from amid the chaos of the burning boat. Phuket Chabad Rabbi Eliezer [Ashkenazi] stayed with the family throughout the night between [Wednesday and Thursday.] And afterward he took part with the Israeli team in the area of the searches. ‘We cried and hugged the family for several hours together.'”