On Iran, US-Israel beef stews

The tiff over Iran just became a full-blown kerfuffle.

Despite being thousands of miles away, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State John Kerry managed to pull their gloves even further off in the ongoing verbal battle of Who Knows Best How To Deal With Iran’s Nuclear Program, a squabble that takes center stage in the Hebrew-language press Wednesday morning.

Well, at least some of the press. While the brouhaha over the emerging nuclear deal seems to be the focus of much media attention, both in Israel and internationally, Yedioth Ahronoth is still zeroed in on the housing crisis, which it has crowned the flavor of the month ahead of a state report, due to be issued later Wednesday, which will detail the government’s failings to tackle the problem, and (the tabloid pretty openly hopes) could be the scandal that breaks the Bibi’s back.

But as the prime minister himself would say: housing shmousing; who can worry about that when the ayatollahs have their grip on the bomb!

Thus approximately reads Israel Hayom’s main front page headline, which is a quote from the Beebs in chief himself that “Iran received a license to develop the production of bombs.”

As if waging the proxy war for Jerusalem and Washington, liberal Haaretz leads with Kerry’s swipe at Netanyahu that he’s just a blabbering coot who doesn’t know fudge-all from Fordo, in not so many words.

The broadsheet calls Kerry’s remarks to US lawmakers, in which he derided critics of the deal as uninformed, as an “attack” and a “volley.” And it’s not just Kerry characterizing Netanyahu as a swiftboater. Commentator Amir Oren gets in the game too, harkening back to Netanyahu’s college years at MIT when he went by Ben Nitay, and was joined at the institution by Ernest Muniz, the US energy secretary now also involved in pushing along the talks, and Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akhbar Salehi. Oren writes that instead of trying to thwart the two former chums, he should support the deal, which will help American efforts to reform the regime in Tehran.

“If Netanyahu was truly worried about Israel’s security, and not the survival of his rule, he would not choose confrontation with Obama and an alliance with the Republicans. He would have aimed to include in the Obama-Khamenei agreement for Iranian officials to renounce their vision of destroying Israel, an idea accepted by senior defense officials, and at the same time extracted from Obama an agreement to take on a military campaign against Iran should the two countries agree that Iran is breaking the deal and breaking out toward a bomb,” he writes.

In Israel Hayom, though, the focus is on how bad the deal being worked out is. Once again neenering that it told us so, the paper highlights past quotes from prominent Americans (mostly from the right wing of the spectrum) bashing the nuclear negotiations. Strangely enough, included in the package is Hillary Clinton saying that the US will choose no deal over a bad deal, a refrain that has been repeated by Kerry and other officials in Foggy Bottom countless times.

While reporting on Kerry’s statement, the paper also gives ample ink to Israeli officials’ worries, including Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, quoted saying that there is a “severe disagreement between us and the US.”

The amount that disagreement has made Israel into a partisan issue is brought to bear in a small item run by the paper detailing that a new Gallup poll shows support for Israel among Americans is steady at 70 percent describing ties as positive. Among Republicans, though, that number jumped from 53% to 80% since 2000, while among Democrats it plummeted from 74% to 60% over the same time.

The squabble with the states doesn’t make an appearance in Yedioth until page 20, sandwiched between a critical review of the nightly news broadcast and an ad for a Kia Rio (only NIS 490 a month!). Instead the paper goes balls to the wall with coverage of the housing woes facing the Buzaglo Q. Citizens of Israel.

The housing crisis is nothing new, but the paper pegs it to the state report coming out later Wednesday which will show that prices have risen a whopping 55% between 2008 and 2013, among other supposedly dynamite revelations.

Aside from the cold hard facts, the tabloid features a line-up of sad sack would-be buyers holding forth on the cataclysm of amaranthine misery that is the current housing market (for the record: I am also one of those very sad sacks stuck in the renters purgatory).

“It’s impossible to buy at these prices, but we’ve tried to stay optimistic and so are keeping on renting,” father-of-three Roi Feldmer tells the paper from the pricey Tel Aviv suburb of Ra’anana.

Switch-hitting voters

It’s not yet clear whether the state comptroller’s report will have any effect on the polls come March 17, but Haaretz tries its hand at parsing just how flexible Israelis are to changing their minds, with a unique survey into whether voters are keeping a second choice for whom to vote for in their back pocket.

The short answer is meh, not so much. The major party with the highest number of supposed supporters thinking of going Benedict Arnold is Zionist Union, with 43% considering a second choice. Of those, 17% say they are thinking about going to bat for Yesh Atid. Only 36% of Likud voters are thinking of bolting, with a rightward turn to Jewish Home the most popular choice. The same number are thinking of not voting Yesh Atid, with many thinking of switching to Zionist Union.

The upshot of the poll, conducted over the highly unreliable Internet, is that those few voters who are considering free agency still want to stay in their ideological home, meaning the main right and left blocs will be mostly unaffected by any team-swapping.

One interesting note, the paper’s Yossi Verter points out, is that while 40% of Joint (Arab) List voters are thinking of voting Meretz, Meretz voters don’t really see the Joint List as an alternative choice. “The reason for this is simply that former Hadash [Jewish-Arab Communist] voters, who are now expected to vote for [pan-Arab] Balad, are thinking of decamping for the leftist Zionist party,” he writes.

Israel Hayom’s election coverage skews to the self-congratulatory, reporting that the Central Elections Committee rejected a petition claiming the tabloid, seen by many as a Netanyahu mouthpiece, is actually propaganda for Likud. In the ruling, the paper reports, Central Elections Committee head Salim Joubran found insufficient evidence linking the paper to the prime minister and noted that other papers also seem to stump for other candidates.

Ballyhooing the ruling, editor Haim Shine has a message for Russian revolutionary lawmakers trying to legislate the free daily out of existence.

“One can only hope that the decision will be absorbed and the attempts by Bolsheviks to close Israel Hayom will end,” he writes. “It is a false hope by interested parties who are not ready to admit that the political right also has a right to freedom of expression, and the nation is no longer in their hands.”