Broke as hell and not going to take it anymore: 6 things to know for April 20

1. Losing it on camera: Channel 13 footage of sobbing falafel store owner Yuval Carmi explodes onto social media, quickly becoming a symbol of the financial toll the virus is taking on the Israeli public, particularly small business owners who for weeks have accused the government of abandoning them during the ongoing pandemic.

• “I’m embarrassed, from my children, to tell them ‘I have nothing I can buy for you.’ I have nothing to give them to eat. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do,” he continues, crying and then apologizing for his tears, which had caused interviewer Noga Ne’eman to break down as well.

יובל כרמי, בעל דוכן פלאפל, איבד בבת אחת את פרנסתו בגלל משבר הקורונה. הוא לא רוצה תרומות, רק מצפה שהמדינה תתמוך בו ותעזור לו לצאת מהמצב.

נגה ניר נאמן יצאה לראיין אותו – היא לא האמינה שתסיים את הריאיון עם דמעות בעיניים.

הכתבה המלאה של @NoganNir, הערב במהדורה המרכזית בערוץ 13 pic.twitter.com/2CUhFSkWrf

— חדשות 13 (@newsisrael13) April 19, 2020

• At the start of the interview, Carmi explains how a customer had just arrived, but that police had prevented him from serving him because falafel stands, like all restaurants, are not allowed to serve customers, but only to deliver food, “and I’m not set up to do deliveries.”
• Ne’eman reports that people from Israel and overseas had been phoning her network, offering donations since the footage aired. During a follow-up interview though, Carmi tells reporters he’s not interested in charity. “I just want to make an honorable living,” he insists.
• In a separate interview on Channel 12 that also went viral, am irate event hall owner addresses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly from a protest of self-employed Israelis outside the Knesset, telling the premier, “We voted for you. You were chosen as one who knows how to manage wars. In the coronavirus war you’ve failed! …You need to get up and leave!”

"במלחמת הקורונה נכשלת": אלפי מפגינים מול הכנסת ומול קריית הממשלה – וכולם זועמים על הפגיעה המתמשכת בהם בשל הגבלות הקורונה, וגם על ההקלות שפורסמו הבוקר – ושהחריגו אותן מחזרה לשגרה. "הקורונה הכלכלית תשאר כאן הרבה אחרי שימצאו תרופה לנגיף" > https://t.co/qFCRF92BUL @inbartvizer pic.twitter.com/00Xvm5DjTi

— החדשות – N12 (@N12News) April 19, 2020

• Channel 12’s Daphna Liel predicts that such heartbreaking footage is going to be what finally convinces Netanyahu to cease flirting with the idea of a fourth election and agree to a unity government with Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz.
• Army Radio’s Michael Hauser Tov summarizes Netanyahu’s dilemma as follows: Polls show his party currently receiving a whopping 40 seats, but he’ll be up against a sea of raw emotional footage of Israelis who cannot afford to make ends meet over the course of the entire election campaign.

2. Fake it till you make it: While the cabinet’s easing of restrictions has permitted an increasing number of Israelis to return to work, there’s a great deal of confusion over who exactly is allowed to work, and what exactly the rules are.

• On Channel 12, one Tel Aviv store-owner says he came to work in a cloud of confusion because his store offers a combination of some supplies that the new guidelines permit and others that are not yet allowed to be sold. “I spoke to a legal adviser and he told me that he thinks I should be okay, but I’m very worried about being fined,” he says.
• The network’s Moshe Nussbaum says he spoke to various police officials who say the new guidelines are simply too complex to enforce and that they’re unsure about the degree to which they’re supposed to be fining rule-breakers, as opposed to letting violators off with a warning.
• And to those who thought that the easing of restrictions would be a gradual process, a Health Ministry official tells the Kan public broadcaster that in fact, his office has “emptied its entire ammunition clip and that there will not be any additional relief measures for the markets for the next two weeks.”
• Kan’s Shaul Amsterdamski writes that the government left Israelis with many unanswered questions, including: What are businesses supposed to do with employees over the age of 67 who are barred from returning to work? What are businesses that are still ordered to remain closed supposed to do to make it through the crisis? And what parents are supposed to do with little kids who cannot sit in front of a computer screen for the long hours of online learning mandated by the Education Ministry?
• Channel 13’s Barak Ravid reports that during the overnight Saturday cabinet meeting, Netanyahu acknowledged that the “return to routine” could lead to another outbreak and force another lockdown in three or four weeks. “It will be trial and error,” Ravid quotes Netanyahu as having told ministers.
• Ravid’s colleague Nadav Eyal asserts that without a proper system of mass testing that can provide results within 24 hours, along with expansive epidemiological data that can track down those who came in contact with carriers, it will not be possible to prevent another outbreak as Israelis return to work.
• Channel 12’s Amalia Duek presents figures predicting a 50% rise in the number of businesses that will be forced to close this year as a result of the pandemic. This is 25% higher than the world average. The US, Germany, Britain, Hong Kong, the Netherlands and Sweden were all between 11 and 40 percentage points better off than Israel in this category.

3. If I am not for myself: The Passover holiday has ended and with it some opportunities for political leaders to flout coronavirus social distancing guidelines. But ministerial antics continue.

• The Marker business daily reveals that after Interior Minister Aryeh Deri’s son contracted the coronavirus upon returning from abroad, Health Minister Yaakov Litzman’s adviser reached out to Health Ministry public health services head Sigal Sedesky to receive a a VIP epidemiological exam in order to avoid having the Shin Bet security service access his phone.
• Speaking of Litzman, Channel 12’s Yaron Avraham reports that the health minister has not phoned in to a single cabinet meeting in the past three weeks, even though he has already recovered from the coronavirus he contracted after allegedly attending underground prayer services.
• “The important thing is that Netanyahu has reserved the Health Ministry post for him in the next government,” Israel Hayom’s Yoav Limor writes sarcastically.
• Apropos of the cabinet meetings, Kan’s Michael Shemesh reports that the latest session and its perennial leaks to the press really irked cabinet secretary Tzachi Braverman to the point where he decided to send an urgent letter to ministers in which he raised the concern that certain individuals were literally giving log-in information to journalists so that they could log on to to the conference-call cabinet meetings along with the most senior government officials. Braverman threatens legal measures against those who continue such conduct.
• Meanwhile, Channel 12’s Dana Weiss reports that ministers have had it with what they see as the outsize power wielded by Moshe Bar Siman-Tov throughout the pandemic, with one cabinet member saying that the Health Ministry director-general had taken it upon himself to “serve as the acting prime minister.”

4. Teaching a lesson the hard way: In a Channel 12 interview that provoked a fury of negative reactions calling for her head, Israel Teachers Union chairwoman Yaffa Ben-David declares that her union is not prepared to add a single day of work to the summer vacation in order to make up for the days lost due to the pandemic.

• The comments from Ben-David come minutes after Education Minister Rafi Peretz told the network that there was no choice but to continue classes during the month of July. “It’s unacceptable that everyone will have to work while the teachers get a vacation then,” the minister said.
• Unimpressed, Ben-David says that teachers have already given up their Passover vacation days and that “no one understands what it takes to facilitate online classes. There is money in the Finance Ministry, they can use it to fund summer school (instead of having us work),” she asserts, as anchor Yonit Levi stresses the importance of “solidarity” during times of distress. “Let them say what they want. I don’t give a hoot,” Ben-David replies.
• Incensed reactions come in almost immediately. Knesset Channel’s Ron Notkin calls the performance a “horror show,” and laments that the Education Ministry has no tools to stand up to Ben-David’s powerful union.
• Kan’s Linoy Bar Geffen says Ben-David quickly made herself the most hated figure of the pandemic, surpassing former Health Ministry director Yoram Lass, who said the government has been overreacting in its response to the virus and that it’s worth risking the lives of a considerable part of the elder population in order to keep the economy running.
• But some analysts do in fact come to Ben-David’s defense. “Would anyone ever consider asking medical staff to work without being paid? Would anyone ask the health and finance chiefs to get ‘under the stretcher’ in the name of solidarity? Only when it comes to teachers do we think it’s reasonable to continue making such demands of them,” writes Haaretz’s Noa Landau. “What the Finance Ministry is asking of teachers right now is to work at half salary during the online learning period in addition to teaching over the summer.”
• Army Radio’s Yanir Cozen argues that Ben-David is simply defending the interests of those she represents, many of whom make very little and are horribly mistreated throughout the entire year.

5. Demonstrating poor judgment: Israelis have gotten used to the “black flag” protests calling for Netanyahu’s ouster and last night’s edition in Tel Aviv wasn’t the first in the social distancing era, but it sure did spark the interest of an audience abroad, which appeared to have been mesmerized by the photos from Rabin Square.

• Russia Today explains to its readers that the site is “often a staging ground for rallies,” including last year when “gay rights activists turn[ed] up to shout down a controversial surrogacy law.”
• “Sunday, however, saw a gathering unlike any other before. Crowds of protesters… stood two meters apart from each other, their places marked on the ground with black crosses,” the daily reports.
• Even Iran’s Press TV finds the matter worth covering, reporting that “amid the COVID-19 outbreak in the occupied territories, Sunday’s protests took place under strict state-enforced restrictions requiring demonstrators to keep distance from each other and wear face masks.”
• Economist Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom jokes that “the coronavirus has finally given the Israeli left a way to make its protests look big.”
• Brooklyn College assistant professor Louis Fishman writes, “Social distancing cannot get cooler than this!”

https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/1251953932206817280?s=20

6. Still at it? As of this writing, Gantz and Netanyahu have yet to ink an ever elusive unity coalition agreement, but officials involved in the talks assure reporters that a deal is as close as ever.

• Kan’s Michael Shemesh cites Likud ministers who say that Netanyahu is holding off on signing a deal with Gantz over hopes that he’ll be able to convince a couple of renegade lawmakers from Blue and White to join a narrow right-wing coalition so that he can toss the former IDF chief into trash bin of political irrelevance.
• A Blue and White official tells Yedioth Ahronoth’s Yuval Karni that the reason negotiations have been proceeding so slowly is because there are too many lawyers involved as Netanyahu uses the talks to ensure immunity from the corruption charges he faces.
• Army Radio’s Michael Hauser-Tov says Blue and White lawmakers are still debating whether to advance anti-Netanyahu legislation as Gantz had threatened to do if talks continued to stall. However, they’re concerned about shutting the door on talks completely.
• The Times of Israel’s Haviv Rettig Gur proposes one historian’s “out-of-the-box idea to end the political deadlock and give everyone what they claim they want.”
• “The possible solution: Cancel Article 11 of the Basic Law: The Government, [which] sets a deadline of a few weeks for forming a government, and decrees an automatic dissolution of the Knesset if that deadline is reached without one,” he writes.
• “Canceling Article 11 would strengthen Gantz by erasing any hope Netanyahu might have of running down the clock. It removes the clock… It also preserves Netanyahu as prime minister during the virus crisis, delivering the stability so earnestly demanded by all parties, including Netanyahu.”