Sinai sign-off

With the aftermath of Sunday’s somewhat foiled terror attack in the south, today’s Hebrew press puts the ball firmly in Egypt’s court.

In a nice little poke in the eye (because who can’t use one of those after 16 of your border policemen are slaughtered) Yedioth proclaims that Israel warned Egypt about what was going to go down, only for Egypt to “ignore” them. While the paper on its front page says on Friday Jerusalem warned Cairo that the proverbial fecal matter was about to hit the fan, the actual story makes clear that the warning included no specific information about a threat to Egyptian forces. But why pass up a chance to say told you so?

The paper’s coverage also features a nicely placed photo of youth in nearby Kibbutz Kerem Shalom reading, what else, Yedioth Ahronoth, and another sidebar revealing that Defense Minister Ehud Barak accidentally revealed censored military information while giving testimony about the event. The paper includes the offending quote, but doesn’t say what in it was censored, probably because it’s censored.

Maariv and Israel Hayom both look forward at Egypt’s response to the attack. Maariv features a pretty nice play by play of what went down and writes about what will go down in the coming days, as Egypt cracks down on terror in the peninsula. But analyst Oded Granot wonders if Morsi’s planes and troops converging on the Sinai will really take care of business (even if they are working overtime). “Israel is still unable to depend on the new Egyptian regime doing its work, even if in their eyes, this attack was different from all the rest,” he writes.

The paper also has a small story on the IDF prepping for attacks on boats in the Red Sea and planes in the blue sky, as Sinai terror moves into another phase. The story contains the interesting tidbit that in the last year (read, since the fall of Hosni Mubarak) Israeli intelligence has received more warnings about terror from the Sinai than from Gaza. “Israel has identified more and more Sinai Bedouin participating in terror attacks –- even for money,” the story says.

Even if the Bedouin are becoming more problematic, the country now owes a double debt of gratitude to one Bedouin in particular, the paper says: Ahid al-Huseil. The head of the IDF tracker unit was not only instrumental in stopping this attack, but also stopped another similar attack in 2008, when terrorists tried to use a stolen APC to bust through the border fence. “We were in a heightened state of alert and weren’t surprised when we heard something happened,” he said yesterday.

Israel Hayom leads off with the headline “Morsi’s Test” and Boaz Bismuth, writing in an analytical capacity and apparently channeling Sept. 11 George W. Bush, says the new Egyptian leader will have to choose whether he is with the terrorists or against them. Even if Morsi isn’t all enthused about expending forces to save Jews, he should understand that a terror-free Sinai could help the economy, stupid, Bismuth writes. “The Egyptian president needs to understand that a quiet border means minimal events, and minimal events bring in tourism, and tourism brings in foreign investment, and foreign investment restores the economy.”

Even if Morsi cracks down on terror in the Sinai, old comrades from the Muslim Brotherhood are likely calling on him to crack down on Zionists. According to that most august of groups, channeling the 9/11 truther society, it isn’t Islamist terrorists that carried out the attack, but rather the devil himself: The Mossad. “It’s possible to connect this criminality to the Israeli Mossad, that has been acting against the revolution from the start,” the Brotherhood wrote in a missive. “The proof is that it warned Israeli citizens to leave the peninsula.” You certainly can’t dispute the facts.

Haaretz is the only paper to not lead with Egypt, instead going with a crackerjack report that Iran’s nuclear program is speeding up even faster than we thought. Quoting Western diplomats and Israeli officials, the paper reveals that a new intelligence assessment shows Iran to be speeding ahead with developing components for nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the story is short on other details, other than many Western states, including Israel and the US, have accepted the new assessment.

Sometimes a pun is so good, you just can’t not splash it across the top of your page, even if it deals with a deadly serious subject. Maariv and Yedioth apparently thought thus when they both used “losing his head” as headlines for stories about Syrian prime minister Riad Hijab defecting to Jordan. While the high-level defection certainly may seem damning, it seems from Assad’s quick replacement of Hijab with another Baath loyalist that the Syrian president has more prime ministers in waiting than his wife has designer purses. Zing!

Iranian and Israeli grownups may be belligerent stupidheads, but the youth can still bring peace, specifically the youth partying it up on the beaches of Thailand. Yedioth has the heartwarming tale of Ela Klein of Carmiel and Hora Amin from Tehran who met in a club and struck an instant friendship, even posting a picture of them on the beach forming a heart out of their hands. Awww.

There are likely a good number of bearded people who would rather not see the picture of the hussies, in which their satanic knees are visible. Lucky for them, there’s a new pair of special glasses that will block out any immodest material for those answering to a higher power, as Maariv reports, seemingly taking a page out of the Onion. The glasses have weird stickers on them that blur women’s whorish eyes and scurrilous features, to make sure men’s eyes stay on lofty subjects, like how many times one must check a woman’s underwear after sex, and not in the gutter. and at NIS 130 for the most expensive pair, having God not want to strike you down in a flurry of hailstones and naked mole rats has never been cheaper. Get yours today.

In the op-ed section of Israel Hayom, Sigal Arbitman, not being melodramatic at all, writes what everybody already knows, that the sandy and beautiful beaches of Sinai are no longer a safe, or even semi-safe, vacation spot, and thus our love affair with them will have to end. “The Sinai has finally finished the process, begun in 2004, that has made it into a place devoid of any security for Israelis. … My heart breaks from the pain, the distress and longing. And only the thought that maybe my kids will be able to go there keeps a small ember of hope alive.”

In Haaretz, Sefi Rachlevsky writes, without quoting any sources, that Israeli leaders are hoping to drag the US into a war with Iran, which they see as their only hope for success. The dastardly plan as recounted by Rachlevsky, reads more like a conspiracy theory, but if true is a bombshell: “A moment before the US presidential elections, when Mitt Romney … is breathing down Barack Obama’s neck, and in the wake of the large number of casualties and the extensive damage that the Iranian response is likely to cause in the region and particularly in Israel, the American president will have no choice but to order his armed forces to join in the war. Netanyahu is gambling that if Obama does not do so, he will lose the elections. Then Romney will replace him and, as a token of gratitude, will complete the military work.”