A blooper reel with nothing to laugh at

Every parent has probably explained to their kid at some point or another the difference between an accident and a preventable accident. On Monday morning, it’s Hebrew-language papers that get to tackle the distinction, as stories of mistakes that could have easily been avoided move to the forefront.

These “mistakes” run the gamut from allowing salmonella-tainted cornflakes to reach Israeli consumers to running a red light and smashing into another car to flying a drone into another country and setting off a major security scare.

Israel Hayom leads off with the cornflakes story, running it under the headline “Series of mistakes,” taking the quote from a Health Ministry statement on Unilever after an inspection of the company’s Arad plant following the outbreak scandal. But while the ministry was somewhat diplomatic, finding negligence but no malicious intent, the tabloid takes the gloves off inside its august pages, starting with the A2 headline “Assembly line of lies.”

“It took no less than eight hours for Health Ministry experts to search the plant for the bacteria that caused the outbreak in the Telma line. Yet given the management of the company in the last few days, it seems that there’s no need for a microscope to identify the reason for the cornflakes mess-up whose scope reaches into the heaven: That’s a bacteria that goes on two legs,” reads the outrageous lede to the news story – yes, the news story – leading the paper’s coverage.

Taking the whole parentsplaining thing to another level, columnist Ariel Shmidberg patiently wags his finger at Unilever like a father sorely disappointed, writing that it’s not the bacteria that hurts the most, it’s the lies.

“What is so outraging in the cornflakes scandal of Telma and Unilever isn’t the salmonella – but the series of unacceptable lies,” he writes. “It’s not possible to lie time after time after time and to expect consumers to continue to trust in the company or its products. For a month infected packages sat in the Arad factory, and nobody paid attention when they were sent out into the market? How is that possible? So yes, the Health Ministry did recognize it as a ‘series of negligent mistakes,’ but you pay for mistakes.”

Perhaps nobody knows that better than somebody who has been in a traffic accident, especially one that ends in injury or death. Following a deadly crash last week that killed three members of a family when a truck ran a red light, Yedioth Ahronoth leads off its paper with a look at how prevalent deadly mistakes like that are.

To find out, the paper dispatched reporters and photographers to junctions around the country to monitor them for hours, thinking it would catch an offender running a yellow or red here or there. Instead, it writes, they were unpleasantly surprised.

“At every one of the intersections where we sent teams from the paper, they didn’t need to wait more than a few minutes to start to see the endangering Israelis in action,” the story reads. “The number of drivers willing to endanger the lives of all of us just so they don’t have to wait an extra minute for the light to change to green turned out to be unbelievable.”

Of course Yedioth, which has been on a (possibly sponsored) crusade for road safety, knows anecdotal evidence, while troubling, likely won’t lead to any actionable policy impact, but the paper accompanies its coverage with some cold hard numbers. The paper finds that since the start of 2016, 902 accidents have been caused by someone running a red light, including 10 deadly crashes, and over 17,000 people have been caught in the act, leading to a 21 percent increase in the number of fines for the offense.

Still, only a measly 27,000 fines were handed out in 2015 for red-light running, a fraction of the 145,000 fines for speeding, and 95,000 for parking violations.

Oh, and if you don’t want to be in a red-light running accident, it’s best to stay out of Jerusalem, which saw over 25,642 people caught running reds from 2008 to 2015, over double the number of silver medalist Tel Aviv, which saw 10,845 over the same period.

The same advice about staying away from hot spots if you don’t want trouble could go for flying drones around the Israel-Syria border, where it turns out a drone overflight in the Golan Heights three weeks ago was caused by Russia trying to monitor a Syrian village and messing up, Haaretz reports.

As Amos Harel describes it in the paper, the incident was a not-so-funny comedy of errors as Israel frantically called Russia to find out whether the drone was theirs, Russia denied it was theirs, apparently thinking it wasn’t after having punched in the wrong coordinates, and then Israel tried and failed to bring the machine down, exposing flaws in its air defense for all the world to see.

While it was the Russians who messed up, though, he indicates the larger flub belongs to Israel.

“An IAF investigation in the wake of the incident revealed several mistakes in the conduct of the forces involved in the attempt to intercept the drone,” he writes. “Among other things, there was criticism of the fact that the pair of fighter planes did not ‘attempt contact’ sufficiently with the drone. The incident, like several drone penetrations into Israeli territory in the past, most of them by Hezbollah, shows that despite the reinforced Israel deployment to prevent penetrations, it is still difficult to locate, identify and intercept small drones in the Israeli skies. Both Hezbollah, and to a lesser degree Hamas, are equipped with drones for gathering intelligence and for attacking (“suicide” drones) during a confrontation with Israel.”