Two sides of the coin

It’s a good cop, bad cop kind of news day in the Hebrew press on Wednesday, with police being shown in different lights by two of the major newspapers, and with the Israeli economy being presented in two starkly different ways as well.

On the one hand, Yedioth Ahronoth reports on the findings of a committee tasked by Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan with devising new means of securing public venues after the Sarona Market shooting in June. The task force determined that there was a “gap in securing open mall, market and entertainment complexes characterized by large crowds,” the paper reports. The recommendation of the task force was to require local governments to mandate a more intensive layered system of security around such sites, with approval from the police. Among those that will have to tighten up security with the new regulations are Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market, the Tel Aviv port, Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market and an assortment of other large shopping complexes.

If Yedioth Ahronoth places its trust in the police’s abilities to prevent terror attacks on densely populated targets, Haaretz only has criticism for the police. Police spokespeople have stopped releasing information on rape and other violent sex crimes because they want to spin media coverage to focus on “positive activities by the police with civilians,” the paper reports.

For that reason, Haaretz says, the police didn’t publicize their closure of a Tel Aviv night club because of an incident of rape there. The decision to shift media focus away from sex crimes and onto drug and gun busts and nabbing illegal Palestinian workers comes from Erdan and Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich, the paper quotes an unidentified person saying. This is all part of the head police spokeswoman’s approach to turning her office into the police’s public relations arm, “to glorify its name and coordinate the media climate to the objectives of the commissioner and public security minister,” the paper reports.

For Israel Hayom, the issue of the day isn’t the police but the army. Its top story is an accident along the border between Lebanon and Israel in which seven soldiers were injured when a bulldozer collided with an armored personnel carrier. The engineering corps soldiers were wrapping up a day’s work near a fortress on the border when an APC tumbled downhill and struck the back of a bulldozer driving ahead of it. The cause of the accident wasn’t immediately clear, and the incident was under investigation, the paper says.

Perhaps because the APC story bleeds it leads, but the Shin Bet security agency’s discovery of West Bank Palestinian terror cells enlisted by Hezbollah online plays second fiddle in Israel Hayom. And in Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz, the accident in the north gets minor coverage far into the back pages.

Clashes between IDF troops and Palestinians in a West Bank refugee camp near Hebron barely get any notice, even though a Palestinian teenager was shot dead. The story is put on Page 5 in Israel Hayom, which touts the fact that the unit went into the camp for the first time in two years and exercised its “freedom of operation” and only at the very end of its subheadline does it mention the slain 17-year-old. Haaretz, on the other hand, leads with the fact that one Palestinian was killed and dozens of others were injured. Nonetheless, Haaretz’s reportage on the spike in state-subsidized yeshiva students since the formation of the last government is given much more prominence.

Former defense minister and IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon’s biting criticism of the Israeli government for “scaring citizens” makes it to the pages of Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth, but somehow the editors of Israel Hayom must have missed the remarks he made at a medical conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

There “is currently no existential threat to Israel, and the national leadership should stop scaring citizens,” he said.

“Israel is the strongest country in the region, and its security establishment… is high-quality, advanced, and powerful. There are security threats and we must seriously prepare for them. There are challenges and security concerns, certainly,” he added.

Instead the paper reports on how the country has experienced “growth beyond expectations” in the past year, apparently ignoring the report published on the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth according to which housing prices in all of Israel’s major cities have skyrocketed despite the Finance Ministry’s promises and efforts. On average, Yedioth cites the report’s findings saying, four-room apartments jumped 2.5% nationwide in the past year. But, hey, according to Israel Hayom the standard of living went up by 7.4% in that same period.