The numbers game

The summer’s war is said and done and even the budget battle seems to be sweetly dissipating into nothing more than a honeyed memory, yet the radioactive fallout of both intertwined events lingers, its toxic tracks spreading across the front pages of Monday’s Hebrew newspapers.

Yedioth Ahronoth leads off with the army’s decision to purchase 200 new super-armored personnel carriers, a direct upshot from the deaths of seven soldiers who died in Gaza while riding in a vastly outdated version. Haaretz’s A1 reports that the UN is working to put together hundreds of observers to be placed in Gaza to monitor the ceasefire and rebuilding efforts.

Israel Hayom writes about the budget battle shaping up, though it mostly keeps things light, crowing about a population milestone it already reported on over a year ago.

Yedioth reports that over the next decade, the army will add 200 more new APCs called Namers — which are closer to a tank than a regular carrier — than originally planned, bringing the army’s total number of the updated model to 531. This will allow it to rely less on the old M-113, dubbed the “APC of death” after the battle in Sheijaiyah in which seven soldiers inside one were killed by an anti-tank missile.

“In the army it is understood that the APC incident in Shejaiyah created a crisis of confidence among soldiers, especially reservists still using the M-113. The military brass heard well the screams of the parents of the soldiers, who quickly discovered that their sons entered Gaza unprotected,” Yedioth “reports.”

However, the paper also notes that the purchase of the Namers will only be possible if the military budget isn’t forced to cut back.

That might be easier said than done, as the Defense Ministry has been saying that it does not have enough money. Israel Hayom reports that as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and treasury chief Yair Lapid are nearing a deal on the 2015 budget, the Defense Ministry is asking for another NIS 8.5 billion on top of the NIS 11 billion it already requested, just to pay for the summer’s war.

Haaretz reports that Lapid and Netanyahu have seemingly already come to a deal, though it is based on the Finance Ministry’s NIS 6.2 billion price tag for the war, over NIS 2 billion less than the Defense Ministry’s number crunching came to.

While Jerusalem is scrapping over how to pay for the last war and upcoming ones, Gaza is just trying to get back on its feet, partially hampered by restrictions imposed by an Israel jittery that materials will once again be used for rebuilding arsenals and not apartments.
Haaretz reports that the UN is putting together a team of 250 to 500 international monitors to oversee rebuilding work. Israel has signed on to the plan, but Hamas’s feelings about it are still unclear, the paper reports.

“On the one hand, it doesn’t want elements in the Strip that could restrict its activities. On the other, the organization understands that without the monitors, Israel will not allow the rebuilding of Gaza. The issue is expected to come up in the Egyptian-brokered negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian factions, set to be renewed this week in Cairo,” Haaretz writes.

Israel Hayom giddily reports on the “Zionist victory,” seemingly over either the Nazis or Diaspora Jewry, as Israel’s population reaches nearly 9 million, including some 6 million Jews, the same number that perished in the Holocaust. The paper conveniently forgets (as did our fearless leader Netanyahu at Sunday’s cabinet meeting) that the milestone was already bandied about in April 2013, with Israel Hayom even reporting it (though not heralding it with such pizzazz) back then.

Commentating out loud, the paper’s Haim Shein calls it a milestone of “extraordinary historical significance,” though his quill seems aimed more at America and their rascally court Jews than the Third Reich.

“For years we were told that 6 million Jews lived in America, a baseless invention that acted as a sort of counterweight to the victims of the Holocaust and a necessary proof that in the Diaspora there is a revival of the Jewish people,” he writes. “The US today has less than 3 million Jews, and every year it is shrinking at a terrible pace. Assimilation is hitting hard and many of our brothers and sisters are disappearing due to its kiss of death. There is really no future for Jews in exile. Many communities of Jews living in the American society of plenty have already disappeared. The only place on Earth where Jews are retaining their identity, multiplying and enacting the huge Zionist vision is the State of Israel.”

Though his words and wildly inaccurate numbers are like a balm to the soul of American expats who left the Great Satan, trading a life of cheap beer and lazy Sundays for the Zionist dream, not all of Israel’s nearly 9 million citizens are pleased at this turn of events.

Least of all Arab-Israelis, who recently found themselves again marginalized by society following a High Court ruling which okays smaller communities to form acceptance committees that can essentially block Arabs (or anyone else they don’t like) from living there.

Oudeh Basharat writes bitingly in Haaretz that no Arab would want to live among racist Jews anyway, though they need to return the land he says they stole.

“Even if I am given a spacious home in one of those communities, I will refuse to accept it. After all, how can I agree to live among a gang of racists, which will almost certainly reject any Arab who wants to live there? And maybe it will reject anyone different from them. Am I crazy enough to raise my children in a place that is a Siamese twin of a white community during the benighted days of America?” he asks. “I have a suggestion for you: Give us back our land, allow us to build new communities that will suit our way of life, with hospitality, a blossoming garden, grapes, plums, an olive tree, surrounded by a typical rural fence, and I promise you that we won’t even think of coming near you.”