Blazes extinguished, fears rise Amona could char country anew

The business of running a country is often compared to having to put out fires, and the axiom proves its worth Tuesday morning with the country moving from stamping out actual fires to dealing with the issue of the Amona outpost, a guttering candle which suddenly flared again.

And in a rare occurrence that could only come in a month that saw both a supermoon and supertanker, all three major papers are aligned against the settlers of the outpost.

With a controversial Knesset bill meant to clear the way for Israel to stave off the razing of the outpost and other settlements built on private Palestinian land, newspaper reports are filled with dire warnings of what the bill could do to Israel and an 11th-hour attempt by the attorney general to stave off the measure while keeping settlers and their political proxies happy.

Yedioth Ahronoth’s front page blasts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warning in a cabinet meeting Sunday that “We will end up in The Hague if the bill passes,” a reference to fears that senior Israeli officials could wind up standing trial in the International Criminal Court over the bill.

The paper’s story, though, focuses more on the compromise offered by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit that will allow the residents to temporarily move onto an adjoining parcel of land until a more permanent solution can be found.

“Six hours the cabinet spent discussing the Amona crisis. They suggested alternative solutions – but didn’t manage to come to an agreement. Tomorrow the Regulation Bill will go to the Knesset for a preliminary vote, but in its current iteration the ministers know: it won’t pass the High Court’s test and so they need to find an alternative, and fast,” Yedioth writes, setting the scene. “Yesterday, the attorney general passed along a suggestion that could save them from the crisis – and fix the entanglement before it reaches the point of no return.”

A product of those entanglements is Israel Hayom, which is forced like the prime minister — for whom it serves as a de facto mouthpiece — to walk a tightrope between its mostly right-wing readership and the rule of law.

Rather than regurgitate Netanyahu’s warning on The Hague, the tabloid plays up the fact that Mandelblit’s offer won’t be valid once the law passes. But the tabloid also goes on the attack against the Amona settlers for refusing to compromise.

“The decision of Amona residents to not accept any solution to the evacuation – even not to set up a settlement a few kilometers away, next to Shvut Rachel, and calls by settler leaders and rabbis to go and oppose the evacuation have led already this week to special assessments and radio silence by security forces, headed by the police, ahead of the evacuation,” the paper writes.

Penning an acid screed, Yedioth columnist Ben-Dror Yemini doesn’t pussyfoot around, calling the bill a “terror attack” and accusing the settlers who are pushing it through of being “anti-Zionist.”

“It’s not like they don’t know what they are doing. They know. The damage to the national interest will be huge. The ammunition they are handing out for campaigns of hate against Israel will cause irreparable damage. The support they are giving the Palestinian Authority and Hamas is also enormous. And still they do it,” he writes. “Warning them that their bill will cause Israel great pain are not those who hate Israel, but lovers of Israel. But they are galloping forward. So we should call these people by their names. Anti-Zionists. There are those on the left. And there are also those on the right.”

Strangely out of sync for a paper that has pushed against the Amona story even while others still shied away, Haaretz leaves the affair almost totally off the front page, instead leading off with a story reporting that Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman has been pressing for Europeans to up pressure on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, despite Jerusalem’s growing détente with Ankara.

“You need to learn from Putin how to deal with Erdogan,” the paper quotes Liberman telling European leaders and ministers, citing unnamed diplomats. “Within three months, Putin made Erdogan fold. You could learn from him.”

Indeed Israelis do like to give others advice. In Haaretz’s op-ed page, former foreign minister Moshe Arens joins others in offering advice to US President-elect Donald Trump on how to deal with Israel. Chief on his wish list – keeping Israel in the loop while “reviewing” the Iran nuclear deal and moving the embassy to Jerusalem.

“For eight years President Barack Obama told Israel at regular intervals what it should and should not do. Israel and the US remained friends and Israel was not thrown under the bus, as some of Israel’s friends in the US alleged, but that was still no way to treat an ally,” he writes. “Israelis can expect that during the Trump administration, relations between Israel and the US will return to their normal course. There are bound to be differences of opinion, but they will be handled as they should be handled between allies. All Israelis have a right to expect that.”

Perhaps the reason Israelis like giving advice so much is that it is free. When it comes to handing out actual money, though, that’s a whole separate story and that fact is all too clear in the growing firestorm over how victims of the recent rash of fires will be compensated.

Yedioth reports that victims are being given the runaround, thanks to confusion over how the blazes got started.

“They promised to take care of victims quickly and sensitively, but even yesterday, they didn’t know who would get compensation over property damaged in the fire, who would pay it out and if all the damage would be covered. The reason: Victims of arson started for nationalistic reasons will get one kind of compensation and victims of fires started by negligence will get another,” the paper reports.

Columnist Merav Betito, writing with the anger of one of those victims, laments the creation of two classes of victims.

“In the list of Israeli victims, every child knows, those damaged by natural disasters are at the bottom. If your house is already going to burn down, it should at least upgrade to a nationalistic attack,” she writes, her words dripping with sarcasm. “At least that way you’ll get the money faster.”