Christie’s Trump card

All eyes in the Hebrew press on Sunday morning are on the United States presidential primaries, ahead of the definitive moment coming on Super Tuesday. The man of the hour in the tabloids, unsurprisingly, is Republican presidential hopeful and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. His seemingly unstoppable momentum even manages to trump the Syrian ceasefire which took effect Friday night, and eclipses any discussion of the Democratic Party race.

The fact that Democrats went to vote in South Carolina’s primaries Saturday, or that Iran’s reformists swept the national elections held Friday, earns little limelight in any of the papers.

For Israel Hayom, the big story is the heavyweight fight between Trump and senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, the latter of whom came out swinging against the real estate mogul in Thursday’s debate. The paper highlights that in the withering assault on Trump in the debate, Rubio charged that Trump’s claim he’ll be a neutral mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows he doesn’t understand what’s going on in the region. “The Palestinians are not a real estate deal, Donald,” he said. Israel Hayom’s reporter employs enough boxing metaphors in the coverage to make Rocky Balboa throw in the towel: the gloves were off and while Trump took a few left hooks, he kept his head.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s surprising endorsement of Trump for the presidential nomination grabs the main headline in Yedioth Ahronoth, which comments that the move could earn the former Trump rival a ticket to the White House on the real estate mogul’s coattails.

“He’s considered a political fox, someone who doesn’t give out gifts for free: he knows that his support is worth gold for Trump and nobody believes he did it out of the goodness of his heart,” the paper’s US political correspondent explains to Israeli readers. “In the Republican Party they’re convinced that Trump promised Christie that he’d be the preferred candidate to run by his side as vice president.”

The same author writes in an op-ed piece placed alongside her reportage that Christie, a more liberal Republican politician, lends Trump key legitimacy in the race for the Republican nomination with his endorsement, reducing Trump’s profile as a “dangerous clown.” She calls Christie’s support for Trump at so critical a moment in the race for the nomination “a middle finger” to the GOP establishment, which backs Rubio and Cruz over Trump.

“Now Trump’s position ahead of Super Tuesday… will be on much firmer ground,” Orly Azoulay writes. “If one day Trump wins, Chris Christie will obtain what he always wanted, to play in the big leagues in Washington.”

Haaretz devotes considerably less attention to the American presidential race, sufficing to say that Christie saved Trump from his hazing on stage Thursday at the CNN debate in Houston and set Rubio and Cruz and their supporters back on their haunches.

Instead, the liberal paper devotes its front page to the historic, if fragile, ceasefire in Syria between certain rebel groups and the government of President Bashar Assad. Drawing its coverage from the news wires, the paper reports that the truce that went into effect at midnight on Saturday was kept in most areas of the war-torn country, but sporadic violations were reported. The other two papers lend considerably less importance to the matter, with Yedioth Ahronoth’s sparse coverage placed on Page 6 and Israel Hayom’s all the way back on Page 15.

What Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth’s pundits agree upon is the centrality of Russian President Vladimir Putin to the eventual success of the ceasefire in Syria. Haaretz’s Zvi Bar’el writes that while every side in the conflict has an interest in a ceasefire, it will take a few days to determine whether this respite could lead to the next step. “The problem is that nobody can say what the next step is,” he says.

Russia, he writes, will wait and see whether its display of force in Syria until now convinced moderate rebel groups to seek a deal with the Assad government, or whether it must renew the fight to make its point clearer. “It’s doubtful whether the [rebel] militias want to put Russia’s capabilities to another test, and in that rests the most important possibility of the ceasefire nonetheless leading to a peace process,” he says.

Smadar Peri writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that nobody but Putin believed that a ceasefire could stop the five-year civil war all at once. “Russia accomplishes its list of objectives it set out for itself in September: it turned Syria into a strategic stronghold and weakened the Iranian influence in Syria,” she says. Were there a strong rebel leader who could rally the squabbling opposition and rebuild Syria, Russia would have already ousted Assad, she says.

“If the ceasefire doesn’t collapse, the scene is already set for dialog — also sponsored by Russia — between the Syrian regime and its opponents,” Peri says. “They’ll need to decide whether Syria will return to being a state with a central ruler or threaten to divide into regions between the government, rebels and Kurds.”