All the scandal that’s fit to print

Americans may be looking to Punxsutawney Phil to predict if there will be six more weeks of winter, but Israelis need only to look at Monday’s papers to know there will be six more weeks of nasty election mudslinging.

Haaretz’s front page skips over Bottlegate and instead goes back to the Bibi-tours scandal, in which Netanyahu was accused of double billing trips abroad during his tenure as finance minister. Why is Bibi-tours back in the news now? Channel 10’s Raviv Drucker has gotten a look at a draft of a report written two and a half years ago that accuses Netanyahu of having “compromised integrity.” Drucker blogged about the report that said private individuals and organizations with various links to Netanyahu or the Israeli economy funded Netayahu’s trips abroad without the Finance Ministry checking the legality or possible conflict of interests of such funding.

While Haaretz worries about illegal funding that Bibi may have received when he was finance minister, Israel Hayom is grounded in the present and worried about illegal funding now. The first two pages of the paper are taken up with an article targeting the left-wing group V15, which the Likud accuses of being funded by foreign donors. On top of that, Likud accuses Labor Party members of having direct connections to the group, making Knesset members involved in the “illegal financing.” As expected, Labor denies the accusations and party head Isaac Herzog says, “It was shameful, the accusations without facts, without any substantiation. Just one big lie.”

But Israel Hayom isn’t done yet. The paper’s front page is dedicated to accusing members of the “Zionist Camp” of having connections to the group “One Voice” (a nonprofit that urges Israelis and Palestinians to elect officials who want a two-state solution). The problem for Israel Hayom is that One Voice works with V15, while the Zionist Camp said there is no connection between itself and V15. The paper points out that former MK Yoel Hasson (a current candidate for the Zionist Camp) helped establish One Voice’s parliamentary caucus. The paper points out that it’s not illegal but does show the connection between the Zionist Camp and the group.

Over in Yedioth Ahoronth, the paper goes for the scandal du jour, Bottlegate. “The comptroller warned: Fear of criminal activity,” reads Yedioth Ahronoth’s front page headline. According to the paper, State Comptroller Yosef Shapira wrote to Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein in June of 2014 warning that there might be some criminal offenses revolving around the bottles, lawn furniture paid for with public funds, and government workers doing private work for the Netanyahus. Weinstein responded to the allegations he knew about these scandals by saying he never received any concrete evidence, so he couldn’t proceed.

As part of the public outcry around the whole Bottlegate affair, Yosef Shapira said he will release within the next two weeks his finance report on the Prime Minister’s Residence. But it’s not the report that interests Yedioth’s Sima Kadmon but rather how the prime minister runs his home.

She writes that Bibi knows how his wife acts at home, how she mistreats her workers and yells at them. The fact that Bibi allows this to happen is what riles Kadmon, who says, “It’s not her, it’s him.” Kadmon goes on to challenge Bibi: “There are two options, Mr. Prime Minister, either you are weak and cannot deal with your wife’s situation — which if true, how can we trust you to deal with real problems like a nuclear Iran or relations with the US… or you are a partner in her actions.”

Haaretz’s Gidi Weitz takes issue with Yosef Shapira, whom he calls the weakest comptroller in recent history. The last three comptrollers have been ruthless in their reporting on the government and their reports led to “police investigations, trials, and convictions of senior public servants. But Shapira broke sharply with this tradition.” Weitz writes that in the years since Shapira took office, it’s hard to think of any contribution he has made to the fight against government corruption.

To Election Day and beyond

One party that would like to put its scandals behind it is Yisrael Beytenu, which may be why Avigdor Liberman is already pontificating on the post-election landscape. Israel Hayom reports that the foreign minister pledged that after the elections his party would not sit with a left-wing government, period. He thinks that there are two real possibilities for the elections, either a right-wing government or a unity government led by the right. Liberman’s outright refusal makes it harder for the challengers of the elections, the Zionist Camp, to form a 61-member majority.

Finally, Yedioth reports on a bit of good news coming out of the elections. A group of student volunteers have formed an organization to help out small businesses on Election Day. Since Election Day is a national holiday, there is no school, but small businesses may remain open. In order to help out the owners of these businesses, students will come and work for free while the owners and workers go vote. While the idea of leaving your small business in the hands of inexperienced teenagers may sound risky, rest assured the students will go through training before Election Day so that everything will go smoothly.