We wish you a Kerry Christmas and a Happy New Year

There’s nothing to be said about the Hebrew newspapers’ positions on the Obama administration that hasn’t already been rehashed in these pages in the past week.

To be sure, with US Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech about Israeli settlements and the two-state solution, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vociferous rejection of his remarks, and President-elect Donald Trump’s comparatively laconic Twitter responses, there’s plenty of material to work with on Thursday.

But the battle lines were drawn long before this latest diplomatic spat. The newspapers’ respective positions are so entrenched that their coverage of the issues should come as little surprise: the left cheers on Kerry and weeps at his swansong for the two-state solution, the right gloats and tells him to pack up and move out already. The one thing in common is that the Israeli papers are transfixed by the concept of statements in 140 characters.

Netanyahu’s public opinion watchdog reassures its readers that that nasty man in Washington’s mean remarks about settlements being an obstacle to peace are merely a passing phase. Israel Hayom‘s gushing love affair with Trump is no secret, nor should it come as a surprise that the president-elect’s tweet “Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!” and Netanyahu’s fuming rejection of Kerry’s “big disappointment, slanted and obsessive” speech are the headlines. Not the secretary of state’s comments, not the issues at hand, but the knee-jerk responses from the people it likes more.

not anymore. The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!

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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016

Also in its fashion, Haaretz all-too-expectedly stands by the Obama administration, and with its characteristic sangfroid outlines Kerry’s key points: borders based on the ’67 lines with territory swaps, recognition of East Jerusalem as capital of a Palestinian state, and a “just… and realistic solution” to the Palestinian refugee issue. The dovish paper’s writers get behind the secretary of state’s proposal, with Chemi Shalev saying there’s nothing new in what Kerry said, but his proposal was “sweeping and pragmatic” and “put before Israel the bitter truth about the settlements and their historic damage.” “The fact that Kerry’s speech was perceived as ridiculous and pathetic, while a few tweets by Donald Trump are received as the words of the Oracle at Delphi, is fine proof of where we came from and where we’re going.”

Barak Ravid, the paper’s reporter and analyst, calls Kerry’s speech “Zionist and pro-Israeli through and through,” which couldn’t be more of a departure from Israel Hayom’s Boaz Bismuth’s insult: “It was a speech by a B’Tselem activist.” Bismuth says good riddance to Kerry, “and don’t forget to say hi to Hillary on your way to Massachusetts.”

Compare that with Ravid’s glowing commendation: “there aren’t as many American politicians who know Israel like Kerry” and “Anyone who truly supports a two-state solution and a Jewish and democratic Israel needs to praise his words and support them.”

And Yedioth Ahronoth, you might ask? That populist tabloid that advertises itself as “the newspaper of the country” tells a tale of two Americas: Kerry’s critical United States versus Trump’s effusive United States. It attempts to strike a balance between the two messages, but its main coverage headline is head-scratch-worthy: “9,500 words vs. 140 characters.” It provides the reader with no information, zero substance, apart from the relative lengths of two things without any other context besides Kerry and Trump’s mugs on the adjacent page. Readers who venture a bit further get a tiny bit more information.

“Anyone who wants proof of the change in approach in the White House received it yesterday,” the paper says. “Israelis preferred to listed to President-elect Trump who with the stroke of a tweet canceled the outgoing administration’s policy.”

The paper’s Nahum Barnea calls Kerry’s speech the “requiem for two states,” and says the underlying message is that the Obama administration “has no intentions toward any additional actions.” Anything that may come of Kerry’s speech will be on the international stage and by another country, he says. Israelis, he says, wonder why Kerry feels the need to butt into their affairs, “and why Netanyahu bit the hands that faithfully fed him these past eight years.”

“Indeed, the two-state solution is dead, or at least entered the deep freeze, that only extreme, traumatic circumstances or a terrible disaster will bring back to life,” Barnea moans. “Kerry erected a monument to the solution, not a recipe for the solution.”

But while the pundits fuss over the latest episode in the diplomatic typhoon that the last week has unleashed on this country, the political cartoonists point their pens in the direction of the second major story of the day: the opening of an archive concerning the disappearance of Yemenite children in the early years of the state. “Dozens of years we haven’t cleaned under this rug,” reads the caption on Israel Hayom’s cartoon, the carpet being Operation Magic Carpet, which saw the airlift of thousands of Yemenite Jews to Israel in the 1950s.

Yedioth Ahronoth just shows an elderly woman entering an archive, on the shelf a picture of a boy.