Back where we were: 8 things to know for October 18

1. Waiting for the next fight: Wednesday’s morning of intense fighting with Gaza has quickly given way to a surprisingly solid calm, but nobody is under any illusion that the brawling is over.

• Both major tabloids Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth use the same “boiling point” headline, telegraphing the sense that the sides are just a step away from all out war.
• Israel Hayom’s Eyal Zisser calls the flareup “the storm before the storm,” and though he more than entertains the possibility that the rockets were not fired by Hamas (a claim quickly dismissed by the IDF) he writes that any possible ceasefire reached is in trouble if Hamas “cannot hold to it.”
• Haaretz’s Zvi Bar’el writes that saber rattling from both sides, but especially Israel’s leaders, is pushing the country into a situation in which war may be inevitable.
• “Israel has painted itself into a corner with belligerent rhetoric that aims to pass the ball into Hamas’ court. If Hamas contains the demonstrations this Friday, Israel will see it as a sign of its willingness to continue advancing toward an ‘arrangement.’ But if the rocket fire continues and the demonstrations lead to more confrontations, it will mean that Hamas is seeking to force Israel to either yield or go to war,” he writes, calling the equation uneven, since Hamas is the only one being “tested.”
• “This balance of threats contradicts the working assumption that neither side is interested in war. In the absence of progress in negotiations, and as the prospect of Gaza’s rehabilitation recedes, and after [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar, as he sees it, offered a hand and got a fist in return, Hamas may conclude that it can achieve more by war than it can get through ongoing, fruitless negotiations with Israel,” he adds.

2. Liberman vs. the army: With the high-level security cabinet holding a marathon meeting Wednesday night and into Thursday morning, several media outlets report that the main dispute is between Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, who is pushing for a wide offensive against the Strip, and actual defense brass, who are not so sure.

• “The defense establishment … estimates that an operation will just return Israel to where it was right after the 2014 war, and any operation would be limited in its ability to stop incendiary balloon launches,” Haaretz reports.
• Yedioth’s Alex Fishman writes that the cabinet will most likely decide on a limited strike in order to show it’s still in charge, but without actually crossing the Rubicon to full-out war.
• “But destroying neighborhoods in Gaza — under which Hamas tunnels are dug — will just came back on Israel like a boomerang, unless it’s part of a comprehensive war plan to reconquer the Strip. And nobody is talking about that now.”

3. The mom who saved the country from war: What there seems little dispute over is that mother Miri Tamano’s ability to get her kids into a bomb shelter seconds before a rocket shot from Gaza slammed into her Beersheba home has allowed Israel some breathing room. Had disaster befallen the family instead, tanks would likely be revving up to enter the Strip.

• “Among cabinet members there is a sense that without Tamano’s heroics ‘We would be ordering a Tzav 8 [an emergency call-up of reserves]’ in the words of one minister,” Yedioth reports.
• “Had people been hurt, the patience of the political leadership would have dropped to zero and Israel would have entered, again, like four years ago, into a war that it does not believe has any benefit.”
• The same grim calculus seems to be at play on the other side as well. In Israel Hayom, Yoav Limor writes that Hamas seems willing to bite the bullet and not hit Israel back in order to not force the sides into war “with an asterisk: Mass deaths in Gaza will force his hand and that could set off a reaction that leads to war.”

4. Don’t talk smack if you can’t back it up: Even though the Beersheba attack had a relatively happy ending, patience is still running thin among Israelis near the Gaza border.

• News sites Wednesday night were filled with stories about kids going to sleep in bomb shelters all around the region for fear of more rocket attacks.
• Gadi Yarkoni, the head of the Eshkol regional council, tells Channel 10 that Israel’s threats aren’t doing much to bring calm to the region: “We should have taken advantage of what happened in Beersheba to restore the deterrence, unfortunately it didn’t happen … You can threaten once that you have the chamber loaded, but if you keep threatening without doing anything, it loses all meaning.”
• A cartoon in Yedioth, showing Hamas head Yahya Sinwar holding an incendiary balloon and telling Netanyahu and Liberman that “from my point of view, we can go back to normal,” also captures the zeitgeist.

5. Blame it on the lightning: One of the strangest parts of the whole affair was the claim that lightning may have set off the rockets, explaining why Hamas and Islamic Jihad both disavowed it, despite them supposedly being the only ones with those types of rockets.

• The idea was much ridiculed on Wednesday, but on Thursday Israeli journalist Ben Caspit posts video seeming to show that there were lightning strikes in the area seconds before the rockets took off.

• “The assessment among the Gazans and us is that there is a high possibility that lightning strikes set off the rockets that were already aimed at 3 a.m.,” he writes.
• Channel 10 reporter Barak Ravid (whose first name means lightning) writes that “ I also heard that intel sources briefed the cabinet yesterday on the lightning and said it is definitely a possible theory, but there’s no sure-fire proof.”
• Even if it’s not lightning, blaming it on the weather would give everyone a convenient excuse to cool their jets.

6. More allegations against Margalit: After a week which saw two women killed in apparent domestic violence cases, women and their allies are using Thursday to protest.

• The quickly organized action, though, is overshadowed in the press by veteran Israeli journalist Dan Margalit’s #MeToo moment, with eight women now coming forward to allege sexual harassment and assault.
• Margalit a columnist for Haaretz, is best known for bringing down Yitzhak Rabin in the dollar account affair.
• After six women came forward against him Wednesday, on Thursday Yedioth columnist Orly Azulai publishes a column in the paper alleging that he assaulted her 26 years ago on the set of news show “Popolitika,” which he hosted. Azulai writes that Margalit pushed her against a wall, unzipped his pants and tried to make her do things to him. She managed to escape his grip, but kept the incident hidden, until now.
• “I didn’t complain, didn’t tell anyone, didn’t stick my neck out, swallowed back the burning insult, and with a sense of helplessness I retreated into a cocoon of shame and guilt. Most of all he made me feel filthy,” she writes.
• As of this writing, Margalit is still gainfully employed at Haaretz (which actually broke the story) but workers there are pushing management to kick him out, with the union writing a letter to management demanding he be let go. (Margalit denies the allegations.)
• “I don’t think Dan Margalit is in a place where he can pass judgment on others in his opinion columns. Ari Shavit doesn’t write here anymore over much less,” Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy tells the Walla news site, referring to a former writer who was given the boot over sexual harassment allegations.

7. The Khashoggi-Israel connection: The apparent killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul may not seem to have anything to do with Israel, but the press here is covering the case closely, given the fact that much of Trump’s plans for the region revolve around Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman staying in power.

• “Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has made Saudi Arabia a centerpiece of his yet to be revealed Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, which is expected to call for massive Saudi and Gulf Arab contributions to fund reconstruction and development projects in the West Bank and Gaza,” AP’s Matt Lee explains. “Saudi support will also be key to the political elements of the plan that Israel insists put its security on par with Palestinian statehood. That means that Israel will likely seek assurances that any deal with the Palestinians be followed by a broader agreement that normalizes its relations with the rest of the Arab world, particularly Saudi Arabia.”
• “That MBS did not understand that reality or could not assess it, that he thought he could get away with it and had no adviser willing or able to check his impulses, raises significant questions about his judgment and reliability, not to speak of the definitive answers it provides about his morality,” former US ambassador Dan Shapiro writes in Haaretz. “For Israel, this sordid episode raises the prospects that the anchor of the new Middle East realities it has sought to promote – an Israeli-Sunni Arab coalition, under a U.S. umbrella, to check Iran and Sunni jihadists – cannot be counted upon.”

8. Take it slow: Jerusalem’s fast train to Tel Aviv (or at least to the airport) is on the tracks (at least when it’s not getting stuck or canceled) but in the New York Times former ToI correspondent Matti Friedman writes about the romantic allure and history of the old, slow ride through the Jerusalem hills, a trip that Theodor Herzl once called “pure torture.”

“The train is a commute, a nature excursion and time travel, all for $5.60,” he writes.