Playing with ire

With the battle of the Amona outpost behind them, Israeli papers Sunday morning take a look at other looming fights — including between the US and Iran and over nine homes in the settlement of Ofra, adjacent to Amona.

Both tabloids Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth play up the war of words (or Tweets, in Yedioth’s telling) shaping up between Washington and Tehran, and contrasting US President Donald Trump’s saber-rattling with predecessor Barack Obama’s saber-sheathing.

“Two weeks after Trump entered the White House, tensions between the US and Iran have reached their peak in a series of aggressive messages from both sides,” Yedioth’s Orly Azulay writes.

She also quotes former defense overlord Amos Yadlin predicting more bellicosity to come.

“One can expect him to be stricter regarding any breaking of the deal, a different reading of fuzzy areas and more aggressive policies,” he’s quoted saying.

Israel Hayom, which puts Trump’s tweet that Iran is playing with fire as its front page headline, calls his move to sanction 25 Iranians over recent missile tests “the first step like this since the day the nuclear deal went into effect of January last year.”

That is actually false, since the Obama administration issued sanctions on 11 individuals in response to a ballistic missile test on January 17, 2016, one day after the nuke deal went into effect.

Forgetting those sanctions and making Obama seem like a mullah in a suit was key to the second half of Trump’s tweet, in which he accused his predecessor of being “kind” to the Islamic Republic, and the paper is only happy to return to its favorite pastime of Obama flogging.

For starters, the paper does an item on a translation of an article in the Iranian media in which a top defense official reveals that Iran decided not to develop long-range ballistic missiles but only shorter-range ones that can reach Israel, because of constraints as part of the nuke deal. That tidbit of information is turned into the headline “Obama okayed the development of missiles that can reach Israel.”

Even the White House’s flaccid denunciation of new settlement building can’t change the tabloid’s rah-rah cheering of Trump for not being Obama, with columnist Boaz Bismuth downplaying the criticism and Trumpishly accusing the media of creating a fight out of nothing.

“In the media everyone jumped on the critical part of the statement, which wasn’t aimed at all against the settlement enterprise, but rather against the plan to create a new settlement in place of Amona. The line of ‘condemnation’ has already caused people to say that Trump has turned into Obama’s twin, and that he is against settlements. There are even those who see the new government and Netanyahu on a collision course even before their meeting in the middle of the month. Nu, really? After the media declared war between Israel and Mexico, now they can expand it against the whole continent.”

In fact, nobody said Trump was Obama’s twin, and the media did not make up the diplomatic fuss with Mexico, but it is true that some saw in it something less than the lovey-dovey pillowtalk between Washington and Jerusalem that had exemplified their honeymoon period.

In Haaretz, diplomatic correspondent/analyst Barak Ravid writes that the statement means that not only is Iran on notice, but also Israel, and the daylight between the two could grow over the settlement issue.

“The White House statement was a warning that [Netanyahu] should show up to the White House meeting with the goods. Netanyahu and his cabinet have seen how Trump behaves with leaders he believes are standing between him and his goals. The last thing Israel needs is for Trump to hang up the phone on Netanyahu, declare that talking to him is a waste of time or tweet about how he’s expecting payback for the funding Israel receives from Washington,” he writes.

Lifestyles of the ill-fated and infamous

It’s not just Trump that Netanyahu is on a collision course with over settlements, but settlers themselves, as Yedioth looks forward to the coming evacuation and razing of nine homes in Ofra, next to Amona, found to have been built on private Palestinian land.

Echoing its pathos-filled coverage of the families of Amona, Yedioth takes readers inside the doomed homes, like an episode of Lifestyles of the Ill-Fated and Infamous.

“[The Brot family] got to Ofra half a year after getting married,” the paper reports. “Not because of ideology but for the quality of life. ‘We really aren’t interested in politics,’ Esther, an architect, says. ‘We looked for a lively community, culture, a good education for our children. We love it here because of the wide open spaces and because there’s no humidity. We understand you need to have a certain ideology to live in Ofra, but we didn’t think that we’d buy a house in an urbane settlement and find ourselves about to be evicted.’”

With all the jousting, at least Haaretz’s lead story deals with some fighting coming to a close, though that’s bad news for anybody who hoped six years of civil war in Syria might end with President Bashar Assad ousted from power. The paper reports that Assad is regaining control of southern Syria, including areas on the Israel border, and while Jerusalem might be assumed to be pleased with the increased stability, the reality is the opposite.

“The rebel groups, even the extremists among them, have generally refrained from any confrontation with the Israel Defense Forces, and the fact that Assad’s regime was pushed back from the border also led to an end to the presence of Hezbollah militia forces and of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which previously appeared near the border from time to time,” he writes. “Now it seems that the renewed entry of the Assad regime in the Syrian Golan will gradually lead to the establishment of new rules, as the Syrian army also continues its efforts to push the rebels out of the southern half of the Golan.”