Buckling and building

At long last, the battle of titans over the formation of the public broadcasting authority that has gripped the hearts and minds of every Israeli, or at least every Israeli paper, since it began earlier this month is over, the newspapers proclaim in Friday’s editions of the Hebrew press. The coalition crisis was defused and the winner is universally proclaimed to be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who bested Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and got the new authority to open in a month and a half with no news broadcast.

Despite flagging public interest in the broadcaster, the story is the top of the papers across the board. The security cabinet’s unanimous approval late Thursday of a new West Bank settlement to house the evacuees from the razed outpost of Amona garners less interest than the political crisis averted.

The glum forecast on the front page of Haaretz says that “Kahlon and [Attorney General Avichai] Mandelblit surrendered, and agreed to eliminating the broadcaster.” The deal, as Israel Hayom explains without gloating too much at Netanyahu’s victory, will involve the formation of another independent news and current events broadcaster, and the public broadcasting authority “Kan,” — sans news edition — being set up shortly.

“This is the end of the news,” runs Yedioth Ahronoth‘s headline, which gets high placement in the pecking order of the weekend edition, but is topped by a story on 13-year-old Ayala Shapira who was critically injured in a terror attack in the West Bank in 2015, and who recently spoke before the European Parliament.

In a rant that sounds like a conspiracy theorist’s Facebook comments, Israel Hayom‘s Matti Tuchfeld says that the biggest losers in the deal reached by Netanyahu and Kahlon are the ever-conniving media elites. “The deal that was signed yesterday leaves the media elites beaten and embittered,” he says.

Don’t pay any attention to the strife between Netanyahu and Kahlon, he suggests. The public broadcaster was under the dastardly elites’ wing the whole time and they “strengthened Kahlon’s hand, who fought their war, and denounced Netanyahu who tried to destroy [the broadcaster].” Kahlon, he writes, “never styled himself as a defender of democracy and free press. He always spoke only about the economic issue.”

Yedioth Ahronoth, that tabloid of the media elites, runs an op-ed arguing that it’s actually the political right-wing that loses with the agreement. Amichai Atali writes that nobody understands what the whole political crisis was about. “The coalition partners don’t get why they almost went to elections, political pundits are looking for excuses underground, and even mental health experts still have not found the name for [Netanyahu’s] motivation against the broadcaster,” he says.

What’s certain, he says, “is that the dream media opportunity of the right in Israel was buried by the man whose biggest hobby is to complain about the left-wing press. The crippled news division, the old-new of the public broadcaster, will give much less room to the right.”

“The right-wing journalistic power that could have been based in Kan, incomparable power, was weakened by the man who’s used to saying ‘the rule of the right is in danger,’ for unclear motives,” he says.

Haaretz saves its greatest vitriol for its daily editorial, in which it rags on Kahlon for buckling beneath the pressure. The newspaper says the deal was by no means a compromise by the two politicians, rather it was “a complete collapse by Kahlon in the face of Netanyahu’s media obsession, and that’s because of the Kulanu party chairman’s fear of advanced elections.”

Netanyahu, the paper says, sought “to eliminate the possibility that in Israel an independent public media body should be established that would be disconnected from political influence and meddling of people with interests.”

“Netanyahu’s initiative to harm the independence of the broadcaster may have been successful, but his coarse and crude maneuvers only prove that there’s no justification to funding the public-political broadcaster with hundreds of millions of shekels per year,” the paper concludes. “This body, which is a tool in the service of politicians, has no right to exist, and must be completely abolished.”

Meanwhile, news of the establishment of a new West Bank settlement interests Yedioth Ahronoth so little that it shunts it onto Page 6.

Haaretz points out that this is the first time in over 20 years that Israel is founding a new settlement in the West Bank. The newspaper quotes an unnamed White House official saying that Netanyahu clarified to the US government that he intends to fulfill his promises to the settlers, but that the Israeli government intends to follow a different policy concerning West Bank settlement from here on out.

Israel Hayom rightly calls the move “exceptional and bearing significance,” and only in passing mentions that US President Donald Trump asked Netanyahu to hold off on new settlement construction while he makes a push for Middle East peace.