Israel media review

Count every pundit: What the press is saying on November 6

After days of closely watching states tally ballots, some Israelis are saying goodbye to Trump and everyone is wondering what’s next

By Joshua Davidovich 6 November 2020, 4:00 pm Edit

Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor

Protesters hold letters that spell Count Every Vote as they cross an overpass while marching in Portland, Oregon, November 4, 2020, following the US election. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Protesters hold letters that spell Count Every Vote as they cross an overpass while marching in Portland, Oregon, November 4, 2020, following the US election. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

1. Georgia on my vote-addled mind: By the time you read this, chances are the presidential race in the US will be decided, or closer to being decided. While the US is slumbering away, Israeli news outlets are watching the vote counting in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona with a keen eye, reporting on them with moment-by-moment updates that mirror the breathless and nonstop coverage in the states.

  • At the time of this writing, Joe Biden has snagged the lead in Georgia, which several Israeli news outlets term an “upset.” The basic assumption here is that the race is liable to be called for Biden at any moment.
  • “Basically, after you’ve been sitting in front of American TV for two nights, I will tell you (it seems) who the president is during the weekend edition of Good Morning Israel,” Army Radio’s Nurit Canetti tweeted just before getting on air at 7 a.m.
  • But even without knowing how the movie ends, the Israeli press has much to say about Mr. America’s wild ride through the wacky world of democratic polling, even as fatigue over watching the slow-motion horse race (or train wreck, pick your analogy) begins to set in on both sides of the world.
  • Slaphappy Israeli social media creature Evgeny Zrovinski first tweets “What’s going on with the vote counts. Biden is going to die soon,” and later tweets a screenshot of a push notification from Walla news which gets cut off in such a way to report that “US Elections: A few hundred votes separation in Georgia. Biden dies.”
  • And while journalists in the US may fear attacks by angry supporters of Donald Trump who have made the media into an enemy, Channel 13’s Nadav Eyal, seemingly reporting from his yard, gets attacked by a cat while trying to file a report.
  • “The cat’s name is Zebra, it’s 8 months old and it has settled in our yard while looking for a home,” he tweets, later adding that he “had a talk with the cat about discipline during broadcasts.”

2. Trump goes for the bench press: Biden’s victory appears to be a foregone conclusion in much of the press, but that does not mean that President Donald Trump’s Israeli backers are running away from him yet.

  • Trump-backing Israel Hayom still holds out hope that his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud will pan out, running a front-page headline reading “From the ballot battle to the courts.”
  • Another headline accuses Joe Biden of trying to “create facts on the ground” by setting up a transition team website.
  • “No matter the results of the various lawsuits, at the moment Trump isn’t showing signs that he intends to give up. The math and the count are still in Biden’s favor, and if an atmosphere of the “president-elect” is created, it will be hard to turn the wheel back,” editor Boaz Bismuth writes.
  • “Trump also knows that it will be much harder to petition the courts after the states have finished the formal processes of awarding their electoral votes to the winning party. It’s always easier to stop a count than to take away votes that have already been declared official – both legally and in terms of how it looks. And as bad as it looks right now, Trump believes that the courts will give him legitimacy if he proves he has a case. And he has, at least he appears to have, a number of serious cases.”
  • And as for Trump’s attempts to suppress the vote, he claims that it’s all good because Trump is a wildcard: “This isn’t an unusual or anti-democratic move by Trump, but part of the way in which Trump has already branded himself and the unofficial movement he has created: an authentic and colorful candidate, who doesn’t operate in the conventional mold.”
  • Not all of his colleagues agree. Columnist Shuki Segev writes that filing lawsuits is not enough and Trump will need to start showing some receipts and then some. “Trump’s path to a court victory is not lined with roses, and even if he managed to bring evidence of vote tampering or irregularities in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, he will still need to show that it’s enough to change the results of the elections. This will be a much higher bar to meet,” he writes, in a column the news site decides not to translate into English.
  • Mark Zell, head of Republican Abroad Israel, is still not ready to get back to his earlier anti-Trump stance, telling Radio 103 “Trump is right, we won these elections and they are trying to steal them.”
  • Others are more resigned: “Biden will win and America will lose,” tweets ultra-Orthodox journalist and outspoken supporter of Netanyahu Yanki Farber.

3. Hey Joe, where you going with that nuclear deal in your hand: Many others are concerned with whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lose, and how badly.

  • Haaretz’s Yossi Verter, first salivating over the thought of a sitting leader on the right being ousted from power, notes that Netanyahu and Biden have a friendly relationship, but the Democrats won’t forgive the Israeli leader’s behavior over the last four years so easily. Plus, there are other issues outside of the US.
  • “The world leaders who knocked on his doorstep, begging him to put in a good word for them with Trump, his “best buddy,” will wait to see the new relationship. The enormous, rare power Netanyahu built up for himself over the past four years was based mainly on the degree of intimacy he had with Trump. With Biden (assuming …), that will be gone,” he writes.
  • Channel 12’s Ehud Yaari writes that it’s not too late for Israel to make sure it doesn’t get reamed too badly, but Netanyahu will need to get to work.
  • “Biden has committed to going back to the nuclear deal with Iran, but has not defined exactly what terms he will set before [Ali] Khamenei for improving the deal made by Obama, and has not explained which sanctions he plans to lift. It would be good of Netanyahu to tell Biden’s people how he suggests dealing with the death of the many pressure policies implemented by Trump,” he writes, noting that both Biden aides Tony Blinken and Tom Donilon are “open to listening to Israeli concerns.”
  • Amit Segal in Yedioth writes that Netanyahu can still take solace in the fact that the Republicans (probably) still control the Senate. But he notes that the prime minister once said himself that while there are Knesset members he’s never met, there’s never been a congressperson that visited that he didn’t invite to a meeting.
  • “It’s easier for him to lose the majority in Givat Ram than in Capitol Hill,” he writes, referring to the location of the Knesset.
  • Activist Dror Etkes on Twitter jokes that Netanyahu can easily transfer one gift to Trump over to Biden, showing a picture of the wrecked sign for “Trump Heights” in which enough letters remain to spell out “Biden Heights” instead (though it would mean misspelling Biden slightly).

4. But is it good for the everyone else? There’s also a question about how the rest of the country and the region will fare.

  • “Trump’s loss, if it happens, will be a large blow to the premier, but not necessarily to Israel,” writes Sima Kadmon in Yedioth Ahronoth. “Even if strategic and public ties remain the same, we can estimate that [Biden] will go back to the Obama tradition of deals with Iran, a two-state vision, opposition to settlements, and perhaps even a change in the way it deals with the UN and the Hague. The approach will be much less aggressive, certainly less extreme and heavy-handed.”
  • Israel Hayom reports that Arab states are worried about Biden as well due to his stance on Iran, and that it could end up sinking normalization with the three Arab states that have pushed ahead with it.
  • “We have quite a few concerns,” an unnamed Egyptian official is quoted saying. “An administration under Biden could cause regional instability given Biden’s, and particularly his advisors’, apparent enthusiasm to forge a new deal with Tehran. In light of the Iranian threat, such a situation could lead countries like Sudan, Bahrain and the UAE to not trust the US umbrella of support that was given to them when they signed the treaties to normalize relations with Israel.”
  • A Sudanese official tells Kan that a changeover at the White House is not expected to affect normalization talks. Of course, Sudan is quite split on the matter, so that may not be the only “official” line. According to the report, the official said that internal Sudanese opposition to normalization will also not stymie it, giving a clue as to which side of the partisan divide the source stands on.
  • In Haaretz, Amos Harel writes that a Biden win will be a boon for the Palestinians, though nobody has any illusions about peace talks actually going anywhere too soon: “The most likely development will be the resumption of coordination with Israel and a readiness to accept the money Israel owes the PA. However, it’s unlikely that a renewal of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will be the top priority for a new US administration.”

5. For amber waves of stain: In ToI, editor David Horovitz writes that the electoral chaos and Trump’s false claims bode poorly for Israel: “Viewed from Jerusalem, this presidentially engineered crisis in American democracy raises particular concerns and echoes. America’s engagement in our region, as a force for stability and freedom, is a critical element of Israel’s strategic defense. A reliable America, an America that shares our democratic values, is our vital partner and a potent deterrent to our enemies. That was not the America emblemized by its president on Thursday evening.”

  • “Israel’s interests when it comes to the US are centrally based on the reliable functioning of American democracy. And America’s president struck an unconscionable blow against that democracy on Thursday night, with ripples around the world,” he adds.
  • Some though see signs of hope in what is happening in America and wish certain aspects could be imported here.
  • While noting the drawbacks of America’s winner take all system, Orly Goldklang writes in Makor Rishon that it’s still perhaps better than the Israeli system of deal-making between parties that mixes everything up: “The US system has managed to anchor its democracy with the help of its bicameral legislature. Even if the president is elected on a personal basis and is full of stormy emotions, the total system manages to keep him to the correct scale. The method in Israel, on the other hand, as pleasant and folksy as it is, is dragged again and again into personal whirlpools and cannot keep itself from drowning.”
  • Haaretz’s Amir Tibon tweets a clip of CNBC’s Shephard Smith cutting of a broadcast of a Trump speech because he is just spouting lies. “This is what it looks like when you have television presenters who are not prepared for the regime to twist their spines. It’s light-years from the sniveling behavior of the news broadcasts in Israel.
  • And even as Israelis make peace with the (apparent) end of the Trump era, some see a sequel in the making, with Trump still commanding so much support.
  • “The American right will remain in his image, with a new narrative being written now — they stole the elections, or we won despite them trying to steal the election.”
  • In Yedioth, Nadav Eyal envisions that narrative and how it may end: “These days a new mythology is forming in the heart of the conservative right. There was once a president, good, and just and generous and smart and the people loved him. But the evil deep state, together with the media, joined hands to push him for office. Americans will keep pictures of Trump on the wall and will buy the book he will surely put out. If he ends up losing, the clock will start ticking, to the 2024 elections.”
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