Word of mouth

Threats to the State of Israel are the theme of the main headlines in the Hebrew papers on Tuesday morning, but differ greatly depending on which daily you pick up. On the front page of Israel Hayom, it’s Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In Haaretz, it’s the deadlocked peace process with the Palestinians. For Yedioth Ahronoth, the bugaboo is tooth decay.

The Turkish president’s statements on Monday about Israel and Jerusalem have the right-wing press seething with rage, while in Haaretz the story appears below the fold. It doesn’t make the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth but appears on Page 4. Israel Hayom pulls its typical cart-before-horse stunt, leading with the Foreign Ministry’s sternly worded response to Erdogan rather than the president’s comments in the first place.

Erdogan again voiced his objection to an Israeli bill that would muffle the Muslim call to prayer during certain hours and to the possible transfer of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and called on Muslims to visit Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in protest of Israel’s control of the contested holy site.

Instead of presenting these comments, Israel Hayom’s headline reads: “Israel against Erdogan: ‘Don’t preach to the only democracy in the region.'” Yedioth Ahronoth doesn’t go that far, but says that “Erdogan is heating up the Temple Mount.” The paper says that even though the reconciliation deal inked last summer is still fresh, the Turkish president didn’t hold back from attacking Israel. Haaretz drops the A-bomb in its headline, something the other papers dare not do. “Erdogan accuses Israel of apartheid; Foreign Ministry: He has no right to preach morals to us,” reads the headline in the left-leaning broadsheet.

As if to show its readers how moral a democracy Israel is, Israel Hayom’s main coverage is about an Israeli court finding a former senior judge guilty of sexual harassment. See? the paper says, we have rule of law here. “Your honor, you’re a criminal,” reads the headline.

The possibility of US-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians is the focus of the top story in Haaretz. The paper reports that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas presented President Donald Trump and his staff papers and maps from negotiations with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert a decade ago, “according to which the sides significantly reduced the gaps between them concerning the borders.” In the meeting between the two leaders last week, the paper reports, Abbas said that Israel and the Palestinians had reached a jumping off point for future peace negotiations. The report cites a “senior Palestinian official,” but gives no additional information about the source.

The official tells the paper that the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah is interested in renewed peace negotiations, but cannot bring itself to engage in them when Israel backs off its previous commitments. “Our aim is to advance, and if we reach agreements on borders we can bridge the gaps on all other issues,” the official tells Haaretz.

But neither Abbas nor Erdogan appear as the top story in Yedioth Ahronoth. That honor goes to thousands of dentists who are part of a new initiative by the Health Ministry to get more of them to provide free dental care to Israeli children around the country. As part of the newspaper’s recent agenda of highlighting the problems in hospitals and medical issues in general, it reports that the final touches are being put on reforms that would bring private dentists into the public healthcare system. “Plugging the cavity” is the clever headline the paper comes up with to report on the dental measure.

Elsewhere, Yedioth reports that police have marked a 79% increase in the number of tickets issued for talking on the phone or texting while driving since the beginning of the year, after having started a new sting operation to crack down on violators of the law.

The video of Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti breaking a hunger strike by eating a candy bar apparently planted in his prison cell by Israeli authorities continues to generate a buzz in the local papers. Israel Hayom accuses the head of the Joint List of Arab parties, Ayman Odeh, of whitewashing the issue by calling convicted terrorists “political prisoners who are fighting a good fight.”

Yedioth Ahronoth gives the details of how the prison authorities planted the candy bar to entrap Barghouti, and reports that sales of Tortit, the candy bar they planted, have skyrocketed since the video came out. It provides no hard statistics to back up the claim; it just says that Israelis are flocking to convenience stores to buy them (having checked a few convenience stores and found that there were none in stock). With Tortit consumption on the rise, it’s a good thing their dental care is improving.