Taking the stump

It’s all about ideology for the Hebrew print media in Friday papers, with the key stories in each reflecting a bit of their core principles when no major issue grabs the headlines.

Haaretz and Israel Hayom both lead off with statements by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but differ in their interpretation of which is of greater significance. Haaretz, the left-leaning paper, reports on the prime minister’s defense of a controversial bill that would require non-governmental organizations to declare foreign funding. After taking flak at home and from the United States, Netanyahu stepped up Thursday in defense of the law promoted by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked.

Netanyahu defended the bill by referring to similar legislation passed by the US Congress in 2015, noting that the US law requires NGOs that receive even a single dollar from foreign sources to declare it, whereas the Jewish Home party-sponsored bill only requires such a declaration if it comes to half of the group’s funding, the paper says.

“I fail to understand how greater transparency is undemocratic,” the prime minister said, rebuffing criticism of the bill. He said that greater transparency in governance is the essence of democracy.

Haaretz points out, somewhat unconvinced by the prime minister’s defense, that the law requires representatives of any groups with foreign funding to have to wear identifying tags when they enter the premises of the Knesset, something the American law doesn’t require.

Israel Hayom, on the other hand, focuses on Netanyahu’s stalwart defense of Israel and castigation of the Swedes by calling remarks by its foreign minister “immoral” and “stupid.” The paper opens its coverage saying that the European states’ approach toward Israel “often suffers from hypocrisy,” and notes that this was rebuffed by Netanyahu in his speech to the foreign press on Thursday evening. Even though Netanyahu called for a reset in relations with the EU, the headline to the story is Netanyahu’s remarks calling Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström’s allegations over Israeli extra-judicial killings “scandalous, immoral, unjust and stupid — and also incorrect.”

Israel Hayom’s pundit Haim Shine chimes in, sarcastically calling on Sweden to give itself a Nobel Prize for “hypocrisy, wickedness and duplicitousness.” See what he did there?

“Across the globe, including in Sweden, policemen and other security forces shoot to kill terrorists perpetrating their acts, and Wallstrom chose to shoot her arrows of criticism at Israel, which for years has stood at the forefront of the war on terrorism,” Shine says.

“The Swedish foreign minister is willing to sell her moral values and integrity, just to scrounge up a few more Muslim votes in her country,” he charges. He says European hypocrites, “sooner rather than later, will pay the price of their pitiful pretensions and cynicism,” and Sweden may be first.

The potential layoff of 3,500 employees from a major supermarket chain gets Yedioth Ahronoth whipped up into a populist-socialist frenzy, reporting that for Mega workers, the uncertainty and pressure is building, and they’re concerned about being cast into unemployment as management tries to figure out what to do with the company. The supermarket said Thursday that it couldn’t pay for NIS 50 million in products, and asked the distributors for a week’s deferral on the payment while they find someone to buy the faltering chain.

The tabloids once again report on former president Shimon Peres’s health, and this time it wasn’t a false alarm. The 92-year-old former head of state had a mild heart attack, but you can’t keep a good man down, the paper says. Both Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth quote the president as saying that he wants to get back to work and that he feels fine after the cardiac infarction.

Haaretz reports that IDF officers have visited Palestinians jailed in Israeli prisons for attempting terrorist attacks in the past few months in an effort to better understand their motivation for trying to injure or kill Israeli soldiers, why they chose their methods, and what kind of military readiness they discerned.

What they found, the paper says, was that the current violence is a long-term phenomenon, and that “improvement of the tactical behavior of troops on the ground indeed helps reduce the number of injured… but the current response is far from being perfect, particularly concerning intelligence.”

It reports that one third of the terrorists arrested or killed in West Bank attacks were from Hebron, and 60 percent of the attacks since September have taken place at seven familiar locations, including Gush Etzion junction, Beit Anun junction north of Hebron, and the Jewish settlement enclave in Hebron — all chosen to target “symbols of the occupation.”