Trying to see past the UN vote

Israel’s ongoing diplomatic crisis in the aftermath of last week’s UN Security Council resolution against Israeli settlements in the West Bank remains the main order of business in the Hebrew press on Tuesday, but the newspapers attempt to break out of just reporting on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s maneuvers.

After days of Netanyahu dominating the headlines with his diplomatic raging, Haaretz turns the spotlight back on the prime minister. The paper reports that the police have been investigating possible criminal charges against Netanyahu. Now, it says, there’s been a significant development in the probe and the police are dealing with two major cases.

Taking aim at the settlements at the crux of the diplomatic crisis, Haaretz also reports that Palestinians have submitted 1,253 requests to build in Area C of the West Bank — the part under Israel’s Civil Administration — in the past three years, and that only 53 were approved. Even more staggering is that the Civil Administration bulldozed 18 times the number of buildings approved for construction, it says.

Yedioth Ahronoth, which appears to have put the UN Security Council resolution behind it, pushes its reporting on Israel’s diplomatic crisis to inside pages, after a report on the country’s hospital crisis. Old ladies in hospital beds in the corridors of overcrowded facilities generate greater outrage in the populist paper than the three-day-old snafu in the wake of the Security Council vote.

“Your whole life you pay and what happens in the end? I’m an old lady in the corridor,” it quotes a distraught patient saying.

When Yedioth Ahronoth gets around to reporting on Israel’s diplomacy, it writes that diplomats are seriously concerned about a plot by France and the United States at the upcoming Paris peace conference. Yedioth Ahronoth quotes unnamed diplomatic sources saying that the conference will try to set parameters for renewed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, including a future Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Netanyahu’s defense of his handling of the diplomatic crisis remains the top story in Israel Hayom. It leads, unsurprisngly, with the prime minister’s statements and those of his envoy in Washington, Ambassador Ron Dermer, who charged that Israel has hard evidence that the Obama administration orchestrated the UN Security Council resolution against Israel.

The paper adopts the same aggressive tone as the prime minister, who is quoted saying that Israel “is a state with national pride, and we don’t turn the other cheek.” He stands by his downgrading of ties and cancellation of the Ukrainian prime minister’s visit saying “it’s an enlightened, aggressive and responsible response.” In quick succession, the newspaper devotes its first seven pages of coverage to everyone from Alan Dershowitz to Republican congressmen joining in the cries against Obama for the UN vote.

The paper’s pundit of the day, Mati Tuchfeld, blasts the Israeli opposition for criticizing the prime minister “when Israel is attacked by the world” and keeps up the daily newspaper’s blaming of the Obama administration for the UN Security Council vote.

“After eight years in which President [Barack] Obama demonstrated complete hostility toward Israel, and after the US is considered a failure in everything concerning foreign policy, perhaps it’s too much to ask of the opposition and media in Israel to criticize the outgoing administration when there’s an easier target: Benjamin Netanyahu,” he writes.

To nobody’s surprise, Haaretz’s editorial snipes back at Netanyahu, again blaming the prime minister for holding onto the foreign affairs portfolio “so that no one can disturb his work of destroying diplomatic relations with those states, some of whom are friends of Israel, that ‘dared’ to vote for the resolution.”

“The journey of destruction encompasses the world,” the paper says. By ordering the Foreign Ministry to reduce almost completely working diplomatic ties with the 12 states that voted for the resolution with whom Israel has ties, the paper says, “Netanyahu is giving up communication channels that the State of Israel needs — now and in the future. In the framework of his familiar diplomatic paranoia, he’s concerned about additional steps that may be taken in the coming weeks, up to Obama’s departure.”

“This catastrophe is happening when there isn’t a full time foreign minister to point out to him the great damage he’s causing,” it says. Netanyahu, the paper says, is incapable of seeing reality “and refuses to understand that an agreement with the Palestinians is the primary Israeli interest; the problem is that in this way the prime minister of Israel is dragging a whole state into the abyss.”