A poke in the eye to UNESCO

UNESCO, Donald Trump and a sexual harassment scandal make the headlines in the Hebrew press Thursday morning.

There’s a notable outcry in the papers after the UN organization leveled another perceived uneven resolution about the Temple Mount that the Israeli government, and the local papers in tow, deem to undermine the Jewish heritage of the site.

“UNESCO, you’ve got mail from the First Temple [period],” reads the Israel Hayom headline, which leads the Hebrew media with its full-mouthed, unequivocal rejection of UNESCO’s resolution on Jerusalem and jabs a finger in the cultural body’s eye with the announcement of the discovery of a First Temple-era papyrus containing the earliest known mention of Jerusalem in Hebrew. “The lies of UNESCO… And the truth of history,” reads the headline in Yedioth Ahronoth, which jumps on the bandwagon of giving the proverbial finger to the UN body thanks to the 2,700-year-old papyrus.

Israel Hayom’s Dror Eydar calls the UNESCO “farce” a “wake-up call for all of us.”

“To their disadvantage, even Jews distant from their religious or nationalist identity must be forced to deal with the question of the connection between the people and the epicenter in the heart of the city whose memory protected us in exile, and because of which we returned home to Zion,” he says.

“Ironically, the UNESCO decision came simultaneously with the publication of an archaeological discovery that connects the Jews to their city: a papyrus dated to the second half of the 7th century BCE, containing the word in Hebrew letters ‘to Jerusalem,'” he writes, waxing poetically about the historical context of the document.

“History will take into consideration those who chose to abstain in the shameful vote and certainly those who voted for the lie,” he says.

Haaretz, however, downplays the whole affair, shunting its coverage to Page 6 and not reporting on the papyrus at all. The paper cares far more about the state comptroller’s report on the IDF concealing billions of shekels of pensions from the Finance Ministry and the government advancing a bill that would significantly expand the powers of the defense minister to place citizens under administrative detention without charge.

The papers also report on the approaching US elections, with an emphasis, as ever, on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Israel Hayom reports on Trump delivering a speech to supporters in Jerusalem “not far from the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.” The issue of the day is the latest polls, which showed the Republican leading Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton by two points in the crucial swing state of Florida. Yedioth Ahronoth’s Orly Azoulay, who’s following Trump on the campaign trail, writes that the Republican has “launched a blitz” in Florida (perhaps not the best term in light of Trump’s anti-Semitic followers and comparisons to the rise of Adolf Hitler — “in this state he must give everything he’s got, and this week he plowed it, from city to city, town to town, three days in a row.”

While the tabloids focus on the American presidential race, Haaretz turns its attention to the Republicans’ fear that the Democrats will take the Senate in the election, sending the current rulers of the upper house into “a panic.” “If it weren’t enough that they’d need to serve under the presidency of the person who hates their guts, Hillary Clinton — if Donald Trump indeed loses — the Republicans would struggle to thwart her senior appointments in the Senate, including Supreme Court justices.”

Looking to the day after the election, Haaretz senior correspondent Ari Shavit writes in an op-ed that US President Barack Obama will have two items on his plate before handing over the reins to Clinton (Shavit hopes): appointing a Supreme Court justice and finalizing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. “But what about the third thing the 44th president will want to push forward? Will this third matter be Israel-Palestine?” he asks. On the one hand, he says, he could advance something that would anger the Israelis and Palestinians and half of Washington that might not even yield peace; on the other hand, this was one of the major failings of his administration: “Eight naive years of a peace-seeking president who feels the pain of the Palestinians and is concerned for the future of the Israelis didn’t yield a single substantive achievement.”

So what will Obama do? Shavit gives the infuriating answer: time will tell.

A claim by American Jewish reporter Danielle Berrin that an Israeli journalist sexually assaulted her several years ago in the United States makes the front page in Yedioth Ahronoth. The paper identifies the man only as “prominent, married and the father of children,” and retells her account first published in the Jewish Journal for its Hebrew readers. Like Berrin, the paper mentions that her account was printed in light of the accusations against Donald Trump. Israel Hayom, which publishes an item on Page 15, avoids mentioning the Republican presidential candidate altogether. That is still better than Haaretz, which doesn’t run anything on it at all in its Thursday coverage.