Anatomy of an interview

The United States and Britain may be a pond away from each other but the two countries united to seriously shake up the Israeli press Wednesday, which fills its pages with Talmudic parsing of an interview US President Barack Obama gave to an Israeli news channel coupled with the ringing of alarm bells for a fresh boycott from her majesty’s best and brightest.

Obama’s interview to Channel 2’s Ilana Dayan leads both lefty broadsheet Haaretz and righty tabloid Israel Hayom, though the papers take radically different tacks in covering the president’s comments.

Whereas Haaretz leads off with Obama’s warning that the US may find it hard to continue defending Israel at the United Nations, Israel Hayom takes its reputation as government mouthpiece seriously, instead giving prominence to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rebuffing of Obama’s claim that the Iran nuclear deal is the only way forward.

Reading between the lines, Haaretz reports that Obama’s warning was a strong hint that Washington will not exercise its UN Security Council veto when a French resolution setting a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from the West bank comes forward.

“Shortly after the show was aired cabinet ministers and deputy ministers were instructed by Israel’s Government Secretariat not to talk to the media or comment in any way on Obama’s interview,” the paper writes.

Despite that, Israel Hayom is chock full of responses to Obama, starting with Netanyahu himself. Without saying as much, the paper intimates that Netanyahu’s ballyhooing yesterday against the Iran deal was a direct response to Obama, who told Dayan that a military option against Iran is not really an option.

“We rely first and foremost on ourselves,” reads the paper’s main headline, quoting Netanyahu and noting that his comments came just a few hours before the full airing on Obama’s interview.

The paper’s columnists also join the Obama bashing, including Dan Margalit, who raises questions about what Obama said, and the less subtle Haim Shine, who challenges the Americans to “keep getting angry, we are right.”

But Shine doesn’t stop there, calling Obama messianic, throwing in a bit of racial tension and slamming the interview as an underhanded ploy to meddle in internal Israeli politics.

“The interview was part of a transparent attempt to speak to Israelis over the head of their elected government and to influence them, using the worn slogans of the Zionist Union, which lost the elections,” he writes. “How moving was the president’s concern for the democratic values of Israel and its demographic future. How thrilling was his concern for the Palestinians, who for him are blood relatives of American blacks. But what can you do when Israeli citizens, after 67 years of unending bloodshed for their freedom and independence, lose their innocence.

“The Israelis Obama talked about are those who prefer to continue to fight to live instead of dying for a false and imaginary peace.”

It’s not just Obama who seems to have taken the side of the Palestinians. A boycott on Israel by the British student union earns prime real estate in Yedioth Ahronoth, which calls the move a “real siren,” a reference to the false rocket alarms that sounded throughout the country Tuesday as part of a civil defense drill.

The paper, which all week has been running a package reporting on worldwide Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions efforts, reports that the government will convene an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss the developments, but notes that despite the move by British students, official London is still very much against efforts to boycott Israel.

“The UK Government will never allow those who want to boycott Israel to shut down 60 years worth of vibrant exchange and partnership that does so much to make both our countries stronger,” the paper quotes the British embassy here saying.

As for the Israeli embassy in Britain, the tabloid reports that Israel’s diplomatic missions, tasked with fighting BDS, have been left high and dry by the mother ship in Jerusalem, calling the diplomats “soldiers without resources.”

“The ambassadors found themselves spearheading a battle: budgets and resources are not allotted to this fight, and thus they are left as representatives to the world on their own, against the international tide,” the paper’s Itamar Eichner writes.

Sure, being an Israeli ambassador is a yeoman’s job, but you probably couldn’t pay most people enough money to be Syria’s face to the world, especially not after the US accused Damascus earlier this week of aiding the Islamic State in Aleppo.

Haaretz’s Zvi Bar’el writes that the accusation should not come as a surprise, as Assad and the Islamic State have been brothers in butchering for some time now. However, the US statement may signal a willingness by Washington to change tack and maybe get its hands a little dirty.

“This coordination [between Assad and IS] obligates the Western and Arab coalition against IS to revise its current strategy of treating this fight as separate from the one against the Assad regime. This strategy holds that while IS should be fought militarily, the Syrian civil war must be resolved diplomatically,” he writes. “Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey have always argued that these two fights should be treated as a unified campaign. Egypt, which had previously argued that any solution in Syria required dialogue with Assad, recanted this week after its foreign minister visited Saudi Arabia, where the ‘correct’ policy was apparently dictated to it. This newly united Arab stance might force Washington to abandon its hesitations about direct military action in Syria. At the least, it might provide aerial defense for rebel forces, even without declaring a no-fly zone.”

Washington has shown it’s good at playing kick the can in Syria, and it may have proven its worth at kick the ball as well now, after a US-led graft investigation did what the rest of the world could not – change the leadership of FIFA. Seeing as Israel is somehow still in the soccer federation, the resignation of head Sepp Blatter Tuesday reverberates through the press, though in Yedioth Amir Peleg notes that the king may be dead, but the hoary ways of world soccer remains in place.

“Too many special interests won’t be willing to give up the good life,” he writes. “They gave Blatter a new term with a massive majority even after the corruption case broke open. And that includes the delegation of the righteous from Israel.”