Breaching the language barrier: 8 things to know for September 13

1. Not just Salazar: ToI’s Raphael Ahren has published his multi-year investigation into a pattern of accusations made against David Keyes, the English-language spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ranging from the sleazy and pushy to actual sexual assault, from 12 women.

• Since the story was published Wednesday night, in the wake of two public accusations from Julia Salazar and Shayndi Raice, two more women have come forward, including one who tells ToI that she had to push Keyes off of her.

Since we published our investigation into @netanyahu spokesman David Keyes, two other women have contacted us.

One said he "put a LOT of pressure on me repeatedly." The other said he followed her to the bathroom and "tried to get me to go in with him… I had to push him off." https://t.co/Azeq15BLVh

— Raphael Ahren (@RaphaelAhren) September 13, 2018

• Keyes called the allegations “deeply misleading” and said some of them were false, but he apparently sent at least six emails in which he admitted to “being less than gentlemanly.”
• There are other accusations too. Channel 10’s Barak Ravid reports on two women from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who also complained about Keyes harassing them.

2. Who knew what when? The stories about Keyes, though only rumored, have been percolating for a while, somewhat of an open secret that many in Washington and Jerusalem had whispered about in the past.

• “There was an unofficial policy that he cannot be alone with interns. It was something that was well known in the office,” one woman from a former workplace of Keyes told ToI.
• All of which raises the question of whether the people in charge of vetting candidates the Prime Minister’s Office knew and didn’t care or believe the various accusations, or somehow missed them.
• In any case, the story has begun to gather steam, with headlines both in Hebrew and English, and calls growing, at least online, for Keyes, who has been rumored to be in line for the UN ambassador gig, to be at least suspended or investigated.

The accusations are horrible. @Netanyahu should kick @DavidKeyesPMO out of office immediately. https://t.co/WeGtV40Z0Z

— Shlomi Ben Meir (@shlomikliab) September 13, 2018

How long will take until @DavidKeyesPMO @Netanyahu's media adviser will step/take a leave/or apologize after @timesofisrael reports12 women claim he sexually harassed them. How embarrassing it is 2 think he was Netanyahu's candidate to for Israel's UN ambassador. .

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— Yossi Melman (@yossi_melman) September 12, 2018

• Channel 10 editor Nadav Eyal notes that some of the calls for him to “lose his head” may be premature, given that there has not even been a police complaint: “But 12 women …. At least a response from the prime minister, steps toward an investigation, suspension.”

3. Left behind: The fact that Keyes is involved with the foreign language press means that the Hebrew-language media is regarding the story mostly as a minor item, (though Haaretz does give it modest front page coverage,) highlighting the divide between the Hebrew and English sectors of Israel’s press landscape.

• Another example of that is the report of a Jewish woman who came to Israel with the purpose of immigrating under the Law of Return, but was nearly rejected because of her politics, which has many up in arms but is getting little play in the Hebrew press.
• However the saga of Julie Weinberg-Connors did get enough attention that border agents eventually let her into the country.
• Weinberg-Connors tells JTA she was given trouble because she visited doomed Bedouin hamlet Khan al-Ahmar and had to promise not to go back in order to be allowed into the country.
• However her lawyer tells the left-wing +972 news magazine that a border agent told her “the Civil Administration does not want you in Israel.”
• “They already knew that they wanted to deny her [entry] and they just had to find a reason,” Leora Bechor says.

4. What is in the Israeli news? The top story in Yedioth has to do with what was previously the main reason people were denied the ability to move to Israel: whether they were considered Jewish.

• The paper reports that the Jerusalem District Court ordered the Interior Ministry to recognize the conversion of a woman who got an Orthodox conversion outside of the Chief Rabbinate, in a precedent-setting verdict.
• The ruling “gives hope to all who went through non-Rabbinate conversion,” the paper writes.
• “It was worth fighting for this,” the woman, named only by the Hebrew letter “Yud,” tells the paper.
• Columnist Hen Artzi-Srour notes in the paper that the ruling isn’t yet a game-changer, since the woman’s children still won’t be recognized as Jews by the Rabbinate and thus won’t be able to marry Jews under the Rabbinate’s auspices, which is still the only legal way in Israel for Jews to marry.
• “True leadership will take this praiseworthy initiative and give it succor. It will prove that after thousands of years of exile, the Jewish state knows how to provide religious services in a wise and respectful way, and not through coercion and humiliation.”

5. Oslo blues: 25 years after the Oslo Accords, the press is filled with post-mortems for the historic agreement, with mostly lamentations from the left on their failure to produce lasting peace, and told-you-so-ism from the right.

• Yitzhak Rabin’s “signature with the PLO freed the genie of the ‘right of return’ and refugees, Jerusalem, the armed struggle. Modern Palestinian identity, forged in the fire of terror after the Six Day War, was created around terror and armed struggle. Can the Palestinian Authority continue to deny the roots of the Palestinian revolution,” columnist Amnon Lord writes in Israel Hayom.
• In Haaretz, Diana Buttu, who advised the Palestinian side, writes that they never should have negotiated with Israel at all.
• “To demand that Palestinians – living under Israeli military rule – negotiate with their occupier and oppressor is akin to demanding that a hostage negotiate with their hostage taker. It is repugnant that the world demands that Palestinians negotiate their freedom, while Israel continues to steal Palestinian land. Instead, Israel should have faced sanctions for continuing to deny Palestinians their freedom while building illegal settlements,” she writes.

6. Bombs on the border: Peace may not have come, but things have been mostly calm for several days. That threatened to be shattered Thursday morning with the discovery of a hidden IED on the Gaza border.

• On Twitter, Yedioth military correspondent Yossi Yehoshua writes that while it may be the only one that got reported, it seems the bomb was not the only one set up by Gazans to target Israeli troops.
• “Hamas is looking for a fight on the Strip’s fence,” he writes.

7. The IDF re-opens the rolls: Yehoshua is a member of the good ol’ boys club of Israeli military reporters who get special access from the IDF, a club that has denied The Times of Israel entry since we started up over six years ago.

• Now, after the army responded to a lawsuit by kicking the Jerusalem Post out of the club as well in a bid to prove that it was only for the Hebrew-language reporters, Walla news reports that the army spokesperson will appoint a special committee to decide who is in the group and who is not.
• In a statement, the IDF mentions the lawsuit brought by ToI as a reason for the new way of deciding on who gets in the door.
• It’s yet to be seen, though, if ToI’s intrepid Judah Ari Gross will get the nod.

8. Fear in translation: English-speakers at least have a leg up when it comes to other items of interest, like Bob Woodward’s explosive “Fear,” about the Trump administration.

• As a sign of how much interest the book is getting across the sea, Yedioth Ahronoth announces it will publish excerpts from the book in Hebrew on Friday, giving Hebrew-speakers a glance at its view of chaos in the White House.
• Many, like Ynet reporter Attila Somfalvi, are not waiting.
• “ See ya later, bye,” he tweets, alongside a picture of the book’s cover.