Burying the lede
Papers seems confused over whether a report about Israel providing satellite data against IS is news, but one thing is for sure: Gabi Ashkenazi and his cronies love to talk
Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor
It doesn’t take a journalism degree to understand the basic newspapering convention that important stories go at the top, and less important ones go at the bottom, and pictures and headlines should be fixtures of any front page. Yet the Hebrew print media seems poised to shake things up (for the worse), if Tuesday’s newspapers are any indication.
The A1s of both Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth lead off with the sensational, yet expected, news, that Israel has been helping in the fight against the Islamic State by providing satellite data to the US, according to an unnamed Western official speaking to Reuters. Strangely, though, both stories bury the actual reports deep inside the paper, a move which can easily leave readers scratching their heads as to whether the story is important or not.
Israel Hayom puts the news on page 15, between an ad for an air conditioner and an ad for land on a moshav (Only NIS 117,000! act now!). While noting that there was no official Israeli confirmation or denial, the paper quotes Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon saying at the Herzliya anti-terror conference that “you can defeat terrorism, but it requires intelligence and operational cooperation. Perhaps it will be IS that will spur the free world to fight terror.”
Interestingly, the paper does not include Ya’alon’s lines about the world being ill-prepared or Israel being ready to contribute.
Yedioth Ahronoth puts the story even further back, on page 21, just ahead of its earth-shattering report on Britain’s Princess Kate expecting another baby. While headlining its article with the news of Israel’s intelligence sharing, it only gets to the Reuters report several inches deep into the story, instead leading with The New York Times expose on US President Barack Obama’s three-stage plan to destroy IS within three years.
While Israel’s place in the fight against IS dominates the front pages, the inside belongs to new revelations in the so-called Harpaz affair, which is now the Ashkenazi affair and too winding and wretched for anyone, even the main players, to know what is going on.
Haaretz is the only paper to lead with the release of transcripts of conversations between former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi, former IDF spokesperson Avi Benayahu and former Ashkenazi aide de camp Erez Weiner, putting a snippet as a replacement for both its headline and main photograph, resulting in one of the uglier front pages in recent memory.
The broadsheet, which filed the lawsuit to have the records from phones in Ashkenazi’s bureau released, devotes two and a half pages (including a large chunk of the front page) to the transcripts, which are filled with all the gossip about what other officials and journalists are saying during the apparent succession battle that embroiled Ashkenazi’s bureau for years. (You can read about the case to your heart’s content here).
The paper helpfully highlights in yellow marker the more interesting tidbits, like this zinger from Benayahu: “I’m annoyed like I don’t know what. I just finished speaking to (TV reporter) Roni Daniel. He was by the minister [Ehud Barak] who tells him: Listen, Gabi Ashkenazi is a great commander. I don’t have any problem with him. The problem is with Avi Benayahu.”
And this exchange between Ashkenazi and Benayahu:
Ashkenazi: It’s possible I had a bad conversation and made a mistake, but it can be fixed.
Benayahu: I demand backing. At least tell the general staff that you trust in me. Yesterday, Barak said after his conversation with [Alex] Fishman ‘Avi Benayahu is worst person in the chief of staff’s bureau.’
Ashkenazi: Who said that?
Benayahu: Ehud Barak to Roni Daniel.
Nonplussed? Join the club!
Yedioth cuts to the chase in its story with the headline, an apparent quote from Ashkenazi, “Fake or not, it’s drek [“crap in Yiddish],” referring to the apparent forgery of a battle plan against possible successor Yoav Galant that blew the affair wide open several years ago. The transcripts “uncover a little of what is going on behind the scenes in the affair,” the paper notes.
Israel Hayom’s Dan Margalit characterizes the release as “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Ashkenazi didn’t know the document was fake? But he did know that he got it from Boaz Harpaz, and he remembered that he personally intervened several times to save his IDF service against the opinions of decent officers; and still, when he got the paper from a man like this, he didn’t ask, and didn’t bother, and didn’t investigate and didn’t check, but his office used it connecting Erez Weiner to Gabi Savioni to Channel 2 like a spearhead against the career of Brig. Gen. Yoav Galant. Didn’t know? It’s possible. Didn’t check – definitely.”
The conviction against Tel Aviv polygamist and sex cult leader Goel Ratzon also makes headlines, five years after he was arrested. Yedioth carries a statement from one of his victims, known only by the letter Dalet, about why she came to the court to witness the verdict against him, revealing some lingering fear of the powers he used against the women he kept in servitude:
“I came to the courthouse to close a circle. Goel tried to look in my eyes, but I wouldn’t let him. If we were alone I would ask him, ‘Why did you hurt me like this?’ Goel, simply, wouldn’t understand. He is a sick man.”
In Haaretz’s op-ed page, Nehemia Shtrasler traces another sordid affair, the current budget battle, to a failure of coalition horse-trading, saying the first rule of politics is the finance minister must come from the ruling party, not a senior coalition member like Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid:
“There are still a few naïve people among us who believe the present struggle between Netanyahu and Lapid – over the size of the deficit, the defense budget, raising taxes and tax exemptions – revolves around economics. Not a chance. It revolves around politics: What will the agenda for the next Knesset election be, and who will win?”
