70 years after UN vote, Israel is no dream

Seventy years after the UN voted to partition part of Palestine into a Jewish state, papers in that dream-cum-reality are a vision of how far it’s come since November 29, 1947, but also of how far it still needs to go.

Yedioth Ahronoth’s front page is almost totally taken up by a giant number 70 and a nostalgic collage. Israel Hayom, apparently having prematurely spent its November 29 celebrations by going balls to the walls on Monday, is much more subdued, and Haaretz makes the strange decision to fill its newspaper with actual news, with nary a mention of the celebrations, not even US Vice President Mike Pence stringing Israel along about moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Pence’s statement, which Haaretz could be forgiven for not putting much stock in, given the Donald Trump administration’s previous broken promises on the issue, touches on perhaps the biggest gap remaining in Israel’s quest to gain legitimacy since that fateful day in Queens so many years ago.

While Israel Hayom seems to take Pence at face value, not mentioning the administration’s lack of movement on the issue, Yedioth does not put much faith in the declaration that the administration is really, truly, seriously considering moving the embassy.

“On Friday Trump is supposed to sign yet again on a bi-yearly presidential waiver, delaying again the congressional order to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump promised in the past that he would move the embassy to the capital, but hasn’t done it yet, and signed the same waiver six months ago just like his predecessors,” Yedioth reports, though it also cites its own report from 10 days in which Trump reportedly did want to move the embassy. If only it were as easy as sending a tweet.

Most of the paper, though, is focused on looking not forward but back, with its first several pages filled with old pictures and statements from long-dead Zionist leaders.

Columnist Eitan Haber doesn’t need the paper to remind him of those bygone days, as he writes he remembers the November 29, 1947, “like it was just yesterday.”

“As a kid, I remember the groups dancing in the streets, cars crossing Tel Aviv with their drivers yelling, ‘Free rides, Jewish state,’” he writes.

Both he and fellow columnist Asaf Schnieder note the other side of the day, the Arabs who decided to reject the agreement. As a thought experiment, Schnieder wonders if the vote happened today, would the ideologues and cynics in modern Israeli society have agreed to the compromise, or would they “be left going around with keys in their hands to mark 70 years of our catastrophe?”

“Seventy years later, when the public discourse is exactly, but exactly, raised fists, shouts, hollow slogans and refusal to enter into any dialogue — internal or external — would we take this bad deal? Were Resolution 181 up for a vote today, in a society of Facebook likes and Internet commenters, would it have a chance,” he asks.

That same cynicism is on display in Haaretz, where op-ed columnist Zvi Bar’el mocks the idea that the Israel of today is even a real state at all, or at least a democracy.

“In Israel there aren’t really political parties. A single governing bloc is made up of interchangeable parts, including everyone who seeks legitimacy by donning right-wing costumes. They’re ready to expel foreigners, support anti-democratic legislation, observe the Sabbath and keep it holy, stick a note in the Western Wall, and let the settlements do as they please,” he writes, including Labor leader Avi Gabbay in his criticism. “There’s no coalition or opposition; there’s a ruling party and there are subversives, leftists who support terror, traitors to their nation and homeland. There are no minority parties, there’s a fifth column. There’s a free press, but it is persecuted and crushed.”

If Israel isn’t a real state, then it’s no surprise that the paper decides not to mark November 29 altogether. In actuality, though, the broadsheet’s front page is a picture of the realities of having a state of your own, from domestic disasters like the Jaffa building fire that killed three, to a report on allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaging in gauche politicking to try and protect their man from public disgrace or criminal prosecution.

The paper’s lead story reports that people close to Netanyahu threatened the Kulanu party that, if it did not back a law barring police from making recommendations on indictments, the coalition would be scrapped and new elections called.

The paper’s lead editorial is withering in its criticism of the bill, especially the part that Kulanu agreed to as a compromise, which allows police to make recommendations in the Netanyahu case, but forbids the public from seeing them.

“This would undermine a fundamental principle of the justice system — the principle that the legal process should be public, which stems from the societal need for legal proceedings to be conducted transparently. And when it comes to public figures, scrupulous attention to transparency and openness is even more important,” the paper writes.

In Yedioth, columnist Shimon Shafir takes Kulanu head and finance minister Moshe Kahlon to task for folding on the issue.

“The debate over the recommendations bill should have led the finance minister to put his gun on the table and tell the prime minister, this stops here. But instead, in the last 48 hours we are learning that it seems the Kulanu head has no more bullets left,” he writes.

Israel Hayom buries its coverage of the law fairly deep inside the paper, and reports on it matter-of-factly, pushing state prosecutor Shai Nitzan’s criticism of the measure to the very end of its short article. What it is more interested in, and what garners its own headline on the next page, is Nitzan declaring that there is no reason to investigate Netanyahu in the submarine bribery scandal that has been linked to many of his associates.

Meanwhile, the tabloid’s lead story seems like a total non-sequitur, reporting from Abu Dhabi on the display of a Torah and other artifacts with Hebrew lettering in the new Louvre museum that just opened there. But the paper covers the exhibit as possibly part of a larger opening up to Israel by the Gulf, lending it some newsiness.

“Their treatment of Judaism in the Abu Dhabi Louvre is modest, but there’s no doubt that this is the start of a revolution,” Eldad Beck writes. “After decades of hate, repression and ignorance, Judaism is returning to the heart of the Arab world and, based on what I experienced in my two visits to the museum in recent days, is sparking a lot of curiosity.”