Dancing around Poles: 7 things to know for February 15

1. The important of “the”: A day after a poor translation caused a minor kerfuffle that made it look like he was urging war on Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was drawn into another controversy begotten by a single word.

• Asked by The Times of Israel’s Raphael Ahren during a briefing with the traveling press about the Polish Holocaust law, Netanyahu responded either “The Poles cooperated with the Nazis and I don’t know one person who was sued for saying that,” or “Poles cooperated with the Nazis and I don’t know one person who was sued for saying that.”
• The comment was originally reported with the “The,” which seems to imply a more systematic collaboration. Several reporters in the room reported hearing him say “The.” But a spokesperson for Netanyahu later played reporters a recording of the conversation in which the prime minister clearly says the slightly more benign “Poles,” without the “the”. In one case, Netanyahu was misreported as saying the “Polish nation” cooperated with the Nazis.
• Journalists are almost never allowed to record these briefings, which means they cannot independently verify what the prime minister said.

2. In a vise(grad): The no recording rule means that journalists also couldn’t check their notes against a tape, thus avoiding possibly damaging slip ups. By the time Netanyahu was boarding his plane in an abortive attempt to leave Warsaw early Friday morning, both Poles and The Poles were fuming.

• The affair was top news in most Polish websites, the Law and Justice Party vowed to push a resolution in the Sejm condemning the remarks and President Andrjez Duda was threatening to pull Israel’s hosting duties for the upcoming V4 ministerial of the Visegrad group, bringing the Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian and Czech prime ministers together.
• Duda said he’d only do so if it turned out Netanyahu had really said what was being attributed to him, meaning the subsequent reports of Netanyahu blaming only individual Poles for Holocaust crimes and not the Polish nation were likely to mollify him.
• Speaking to the Ynet news site, one Polish source expressed amazement at Netanyahu’s reported comment, which came after the PM had seemed to go so far toward cooperating with the Polish narrative in exchange for diplomatic support. “Why did he need to say this?” the source is quoted saying.
• The source also says Poland realizes that the comments may be related to domestic concerns ahead of Israeli elections, but notes that Poland has elections coming up and Poles will be demanding an explanation.
• Channel 13’s Nadav Eyal seems to indicate that Netanyahu is getting his just desserts. “Those who go to bed with nationalists wake up with historical revisionism and Holocaust denial.”
• Luckily for Netanyahu, the Poles know when to ignore inconvenient truths, and by late Friday morning, they were saying the issue has been resolved, blaming it on press manipulation.

3. The wings of history: The episode has been a sour cherry on top of a visit to Poland that has been mired in controversy since well before it started.

• Netanyahu had reportedly been seeking open meetings with Arab Foreign Ministers gathering, but had to make do with a meeting with an Omani foreign minister and a chance to sit next to a grumpy looking FM from Yemen.
• Apparently still looking for a win, Netanyahu’s office leaked a video of a closed door session in which Arab foreign ministers can be heard bashing Iran, backing Israel and in one case seeming to shunt aside the Palestinian issue.
• The video was quickly taken down, though not before it went all around, likely making Arab leaders think twice before attending a closed door meeting with Netanyahu again.
• Still, there are signs of hope. In Haaretz, Zvi Bar’el writes that even if the Arabs at the summit were just paying Israel and the US lip service, there are positive indicators.
• “Such an Israeli-Arab meeting, the first since the international summits that accompanied the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, is a positive development and even if it does not supply concrete diplomatic results such as the establishment of diplomatic relations or trade agreements, it still could very well advance understandings with Israel, weaken the across-the-board official Arab ban not to conduct contacts with Israel – and it also strengthens the foundations of the formal agreements Israel has with Egypt and Jordan,” he writes.
• Yedioth Ahronoth’s Itamar Eichner writes that “at times, one could feel as if they were on the wingtip of history.”

4. Just nod and smile: Others are more bearish on Arab-Israeli unity over Iran in the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian deal. “To me, what is so stunning about Warsaw is what it says about the change in regional dynamics,” former negotiator Aaron David Miller tells al-Monitor. “What it doesn’t show in my judgment is that the Arabs are now inclined to forget about the Palestinian issue.”

• The New York Times, describing a meeting in which Jared Kushner spoke about the Trump administration’s peace plan, notes that the seating plan may have been telling. At one table were Netanyahu, Kushner and Mike Pompeo, while at the other end were the Saudis, the UAE and their arch rival Qatar.
• “Facing Mr. Netanyahu during that meeting, those officials tried to contain themselves to cursory nods when they happened to agree with something,” the paper reports.
• It also quotes an observer describing the mood as “let’s give it a chance,” which it notes isn’t quite a ringing endorsement.
• Little leaked out of that meeting, though ironically, one thing that did come out was Kushner’s feeling about leaks, with the Associated Press quoting a diplomat who said Kushner “would not discuss specifics because after studying previous failed peace efforts, he and his team had determined that leaks damaged their prospects by forcing the parties to respond publicly to partial and often inaccurate reports of what they contained.”

5. Grounded: Netanyahu may have been eager to skedaddle out of Warsaw after the Holocaust comment kerfuffle, but a driver of a pullback tractor had other ideas, crashing into Netanyahu’s plane and forcing him back to his hotel to wait until El Al could fly a new plane into Warsaw for him to take back Friday morning.

• If a departure delay is your idea of excitement, you’ll probably like reading Walla News, which describes the incident as “Drama on the flight,” posting several updates throughout the night.
• Netanyahu aide Edna Halbani, who has been in charge of prime ministerial flights for decades, tells reporters Netanyahu is not the first to get stuck, with Ehud Barak having a similar issue in 1999.
• Israel Radio’s Keren Neubach, remembering that incident, recalls it was “not fun.”

6. Everybody is right: A poll (yes another one) published by Israel Hayom shows that 39% of the country wants a right-wing government, while only 22% want a unity government, 21% want a left-wing government, and 18% want “other.”

• Analyst Mati Tuchfeld writes in the paper that “the results are surprising and explain well Likud’s campaign to connect [Benny] Gantz to the left and to [Ahmed], and also how much Israel Resilience lost with its campaign.”
• Perhaps the New Right got the message? The party is launching Friday its new campaign, which takes the Israeli love of portmanteaus to its logical extreme (or someone’s spacebar was broken):

New Right's New campaign slogan: JEWISRAELIRIGHTWINGER pic.twitter.com/N4skY4Yqax

— Raoul Wootliff (@RaoulWootliff) February 15, 2019

• And while Netanyahu has promised not to be in the same government as Gantz’s party, Haaretz’s Yossi Verter puts little stock in that.
• “The veto on Gantz took me back to the 2013 election campaign. Two weeks before Election Day, Netanyahu promised – in an on-the-record conversation with this reporter, for quotation and for attribution – that he would never allow Tzipi Livni, the leader of Hatnua, to conduct diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinians,” he writes. “He had convincing reasons, too, but they all evaporated two minutes after the election, when he launched secret talks with Livni, at the end of which he gave her not only the negotiations portfolio but also the Justice Ministry and chairmanship of the Ministerial Committee for Legislation.”

7. Everything’s hunky-dory in Litzmanland: UTJ head Yaakov Litzman was questioned by police investigators Thursday, over suspicions he sought to help a former school principal avoid extradition over allegations she molested students in Australia.

• Don’t expect to read about it in Hamodia, though, the ultra-Orthodox paper that is seen as tightly controlled by Litzman. Not only does it not have women, the paper does not have stories of its leader protecting ones that are pedophiles anywhere on its pages.
• As Twitter user queenjo102, who flagged the missing item, notes, the paper is a “world where everything is great.”

גיליון יום ששי של המודיע – עיתון הבית של ליצמן
צדיקים מלאכתם נעשית בסתר:
הוספת מיטות בבתי חולים, סיוע לחרדיות פדופיליות במצוקה וחקירות במשטרה ביחידה 433
כלום לא מופיע בעיתון של ליצמן!
עולם שכולו טוב@idokius @LiSteinitz pic.twitter.com/W4O21uPJmG

— Data Observatory ???? הצופה בנתונים (@queenjo102) February 15, 2019

8.Not child’s play: With the holiday of Purim approaching, Yedioth has a bit of news you can use, if you can use protectionist scaring of consumers.

• The paper writes that parents should think twice before ordering costumes and accessories off of Ali Express, because many of them contain materials that are bad for kids. One wig it tests is extremely flammable, while a marker for face painting has toxic materials. And that’s not even getting into the choking hazards that abound.
• “I, who know this better than the average consumer, would not risk buying a costume in these places,” an official with the Standards Institute of Israel tells the paper.