The state of the state’s soul

Murder, drugs and legal wrangling are all winning components of television shows… and the headlines in the Hebrew press on Wednesday morning, as Syria, Teva Pharmaceuticals and the West Bank outpost law dominate the papers. While Haaretz puts the spotlight on an Israeli blogger’s extradition to Azerbaijan, the tabloids do their share to keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cigar and champagne scandal in the limelight.

The discovery of a prison in Syria where at least 13,000 people were killed by the regime of President Bashar Assad tops Yedioth Ahronoth’s coverage. It even takes precedence over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s denial of knowing anything about champagne given to his wife by a billionaire friend, which is the focus of an ongoing police investigation. The paper offers a translated summary of Amnesty International’s chilling report on the atrocities that have gone on at Saydnaya prison for the past six years for its Hebrew-reading audience, and includes an op-ed by Ben-Dror Yemini.

“A week after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a death camp was exposed not many kilometers from the State of Israel, and the world was again silent,” he writes, and in a scathing rebuke of Israeli society says: “All the talk of ‘Never Again’ is shown to be empty declarations. Who cares?”

He opens fire at the Belgian lawmakers who met with Assad earlier this week, and at former US president Barack Obama for letting the Syrian president cross a red line by using chemical weapons, and not saying a word since.

“For decades already the world has been silent. Since the Holocaust it hasn’t stopped being silent. The world was silent in Biafra. The world was silent in Rwanda. The world was silent and is silent about the genocide in Darfur. The world is silent in the face of the fact that annually, in recent years, global jihad murders around 25,000 people on average.”

Yemini’s point is simple and clear. “Israel can, and is perhaps even morally obliged, to open a refugee camp on the border with Syria to house all those whose lives are truly threatened.” The horrors the Syrian government and jihadists subject their people to will be visited tenfold upon the Jews if they are given the opportunity, he warns, urging Israel to take humanitarian action. “It’s a moral imperative.”

If anyone bothers getting to Page 27 of Israel Hayom, they’ll find a small report on this based on wire copy. Haaretz likewise cribs off the Guardian, and while it runs a story on the front page, the bulk of the coverage is on Page 8.

Israel Hayom keeps its focus on the recently passed outpost law, which riled European governments but didn’t provoke a peep out of the Americans. The paper’s top story deals with a report that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit will appear before the Supreme Court to speak on behalf of appeals expected to be filed against the law. Mandelblit was an outspoken opponent of the legislation from its infancy as a bill to its maturation into law earlier this week when it was approved by the Knesset. The paper says that while it’s usually standard procedure for the court to ask the attorney general to give his legal opinion on matters of great public importance, “it seems that Mandelblit wants to present his opinion of his own accord.”

The paper’s Dror Eydar writes not so much an op-ed as a laundry list of ideas about the outpost law and its implications. He calls it a reaction by the right to left-wing groups that try to prevent the normalization of lives in the most natural place for Jews to live (the West Bank, naturally). Eydar contends the law fills a void and “deals with an unacceptable reality, in which part of what was built may be demolished.”

Concerning the international community’s protestation against the law’s passage and the settlements in general, he sweeps them away, saying, “The opponents to the return to Zion don’t need reasons. Their positions are opposition in principle. We don’t live by their word.”

The bottom line isn’t a legal conundrum, but the very soul of the Jewish state, he says, “the question of our identity as a people returning to their ancestral land after many years and asking to renew life there: Who are we?”

Haaretz devotes its daily editorial to the West Bank outpost legalization law, saying that it’s incumbent upon the Supreme Court to make use of its “exceptional authority” to overturn Knesset legislation. The law, writes the paper, “which applies to the West Bank exclusively, sharpens tenfold the existence of two separate legal systems, one in Israel and one that applies only for Jews in the territories.” In addition to the law’s immediate impact, it effectively constitutes the extension of Knesset authority over the West Bank, rather than the IDF, “a sign of creeping annexation, in the legal sense.”

“The State of Israel, and the Zionist project as a whole, doesn’t belong to to the far right or the government. The Israeli public deserves for the Supreme Court to protest, through its ruling, the shame that the Knesset placed on our law books,” Haaretz says.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Haaretz and Israel Hayom both spill considerable ink about the police opening an investigation into suspected bribery of foreign officials by Teva Pharmaceuticals, one of the country’s corporate titans. “At the center of the investigation is the suspicion that the company was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the forbidden payments, and that it falsified documentation to cover them up,” Haaretz reports. In a plea deal in the United States, the company had copped to breaking the law and agreed to pay a $500 million fine.

While Israel Hayom puts the major business story on the front page, its coverage is shunted to Page 15, behind news of female enlistees to the IDF being gung-ho about combat service and the army appointing a new spokesman.