Dead government walking: What the press is saying on August 25

1. Dr. Death: Following a bit of de rigueur last minute drama, Israel’s squabbling coalition came together to push off a budget deadline by 120 days Monday, averting its collapse and early elections, but one would be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the government will do much to save itself before that deadline.

• In fact, if anything most see it as little more than a sick patient barely clinging to life, and medical terms of the hopeless variety abound in press coverage.
• “There’s the feeling that the government hasn’t been saved, but just given four more months to live,” remarked Channel 12 analyst Amit Segal, as it became clear in the moments before the vote that the sides would come together to okay the deadline extension.
• A headline in Israel Hayom says that the government has been “condemned to continuing death throes.”
• “We put a bandage on last night. The government needs surgery,” it quotes a Likud source saying.
• Both the print versions of Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth run the identical headline “Until the next crisis,” on their front pages.
• Walla’s Tal Shalev compares the delay to a “temporary bandage” (are there permanent bandages?): “The problems and divisions that paralyzed the government have not been solved but just pushed off for treatment at a later date,” she writes.

2. No more Mr. Nice Gantz: In Yedioth, Nahum Barnea writes that “the patient is in critical condition, but a bit more stable.”

• While the accepted wisdom holds that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the political wizard and Blue and White head Benny Gantz the neophyte, Barnea notes that Gantz actually managed to pull a fast one over Netanyahu, referring to Gantz’s speech just ahead of the vote as a pressure tactic devised by Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi.
• “In the end they came to a decision: Gantz would announce that he would deliver a dramatic speech at 8:30 p.m. It was a maneuver. He was moving the pressure onto Netanyahu. The negotiations were over. There would be no concessions. Or a budget deadline delay or elections,” he writes. “Netanyahu blinked first. Moments before Gantz began his speech, he sat in front of a camera and read out his own statement, which promised that despite all of Blue and White’s sins, the Likud would vote for the Hauser bill.”
• Haaretz’s Yossi Verter also writes that Gantz managed to get one up on Netanyahu, using the same exact phrase (seen elsewhere as well) that “Netanyahu blinked first.”
• “When Netanyahu understood that disbanding the Knesset and heading to elections at the peak of an unprecedented economic crisis would be on his shoulders, the shoulders of the suspect who wishes to appoint his own prosecutors – he gave in,” he writes.
• While few have picked up on it, the deadline, which was extended at the last minute from 100 days out to 120, means that the government could collapse on December 23, due to the lack of a budget that lasts for all of 8 days.
• The change, inserted by Blue and White, is likely meant for a future fight in which the party will point to the ridiculousness of an 8-day budget and instead demand a budget covering the last days of 2020 and all of 2021, depriving Netanyahu of a future exit hatch.
• As one ToI writer puts it: “That Likud agreed shows just how much Netanyahu felt he was losing the fight yesterday. Bluster aside, the whole thing was a fiasco for him.”

3. 120 things I hate about you: Bluster was in no short supply Monday as the deadline neared.

• Haaretz’s Verter, not for the first time, expresses belief that Gantz’s tough-guy performance will herald a change in him: “After Gantz ceremoniously announced that he is no longer the Mr. Nice Guy we once knew, and after his self-confidence returned yesterday, we can now expect a totally different performance.”
• Zman Yisrael’s Shalom Yerushalmi says that campaigning has already begun, albeit while the government is still ostensibly functioning. “This time it will be much more merciless and much tougher,” he quotes a Likud source saying.
• In Israel Hayom, Moti Tuchfeld writes about Gantz as if he is a sad sack doe-eyed puppy in need of mercy. “It was tough to watch Gantz’s speech last night without feeling bad for him … Gantz knows he will never get the premiership from Netanyahu, but still held out his hand toward him in peace.”
• In Haaretz, Chemi Shalev writes that Netanyahu is the tragic figure, so duplicitous that nobody believes anything he says or cares to listen anymore, even when he notches a real achievement: “The prime minister has steadily and successfully cemented his dominant position in Israeli politics in inverse proportion to his ever-diminishing credibility – and herein lies his tragedy. His proven tendency to bend the truth to suit his needs mars his every achievement, most recently and notably his diplomatic coup with the United Arab Emirates.”
• Counting up the winners and losers, Channel 12’s Dafna Liel writes that Gantz managed to score with the “public understanding for the first time his contribution to the judicial system, referring to him putting the brakes on an alleged bid by Netanyahu to stock the system with friendly appointees. But she writes that he loses a point for still being unable to get the government to agree on its power-sharing fundamentals.
• One might also feel bad for the politicians speaking to Army Radio on Tuesday morning who express hopes that the government could actually start to function now.
• “We want the government to work, and so supported the budget delay to give four months to try to start anew,” says minister of all trades Zeev Elkin.
• “Everyone understands we need to work together,” pipes in Science Minister Izhar Shai.

4. Whip it good: Not so coalition whip Miki Zohar, who tells the station that “if there’s no way to sit and agree with Blue and White, there’s no point in having the government. If you ask me, we’ll have elections in another 120 days.” (He presumably means elections will be called in 120 days.)

• Zohar’s bombast was on full display as Likud’s attack dog on TV all throughout Monday, as were replays of him having a nice laugh in a Knesset Committee meeting when Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi suggested that the government agree to keep to what it agreed to regarding the rotation.
• Asked on Channel 12 what was so funny, by a straight faced Yonit Levi, he says it is funny because of all the obsession “with Blue and White, and with you in the media, all the time asking will the rotation happen, won’t it,” before going to claim, after accusing Blue and White of breaking every agreement, that keeping to the agreements is not important.
• Walla’s Nadav Menuchin writes that “While presenters searched time after time for ways to poke holes in Zohar, he was left just to blame the media. That’s usually a good sign that the interviewee has run out of explanations. On Channel 13, he ended by saying that ‘the truth is stronger than all.’ Instead of bursting out laughing, [presenter Udi] Segal returned the quip back to him. ‘There’s no doubt the truth is stronger than all,’ he echoed him, in another answer freighted with significance.

5. Backdrop boys: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit, which ended Tuesday morning with a direct flight to Khartoum, is continuing to make waves, both for his Arab-Israeli normalization effort, and for what some see as him normalizing out-of bounds behavior by recording a message to the RNC from Jerusalem.

• Haaretz’s Avi Scharf notes that “direct” was not actually that direct.

Direct, but still via Jordan ????https://t.co/g6VPFlkH0e

— avi scharf (@avischarf) August 25, 2020

• The news that Pompeo’s RNC message was pre-recorded, meaning he could have done it in Washington, further enforces the idea that Jerusalem is being used for a prop, which i guess is nicer than Khartoum, at least to the evangelicals.
• CNN snaps a picture of Pompeo recording the spot from the roof of the King David hotel, as the sun sets behind him.

@SecPompeo appears to tape his RNC address from the roof top of the King David hotel in Jerusalem. A State Department spox said Sunday that “Secretary Pompeo will address the convention in his personal capacity” and “(n)o State Department resources will be used.” pic.twitter.com/b1zMmd3FdV

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— CNN NationalSecurity (@NatSecCNN) August 24, 2020

• “This is apocalyptic foreign policy in a nutshell: Israel not as a real country but as fantasyland, backdrop for Christian myth. We who live here are not people; we are hobbits or orcs, extras in crowd scenes of their story,” tweets historian Gershom Gorenberg.

This is apocalyptic foreign policy in a nutshell: Israel not as a real country but as fantasyland, backdrop for Christian myth. We who live here are not people; we are hobbits or orcs, extras in crowd scenes of their story. https://t.co/yN7XI69nXO

— Gershom Gorenberg גרשום גורנברג (@GershomG) August 24, 2020

• Reuters reports that in July a cable sent to State Department employees, with Pompeo’s name on top, expressly forbid them from this type of activity.
• “Presidential and political appointees … may not engage in any partisan political activity in concert with a partisan campaign, political party, or partisan political group, even on personal time and outside of the federal workplace,” reads the cable.
• It quotes Eliot Engel, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, as saying that “will violate legal restrictions on political activities according to a longstanding interpretation by State Department lawyers.”
• While the State Department claims no federal funds are being used for the appearance, NBC news notes that the claim is belied by the use of support staff and other accoutrements, like the plane that brought Pompeo to Israel.
• “People are extraordinarily upset about it. This is really a bridge too far,” former ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield tells the network. “Pompeo is clearly ensuring the State Department is politicized by using his position to carry out what is basically a partisan mission.”

6. The spurn and the screw: While the apparent scandal gets little press in the Hebrew media, possible brewing problems over normalization with the UAE does get play, including a report in Walla news that the UAE canceled a three-way meet between the US, Israeli and UAE UN envoys, to send a message of displeasure with regard to Netanyahu for publicly coming out against the F-35 deal.

• Officials in the UAE involved in the matter had been under the impression that Netanyahu would avoid speaking out publicly against the deal, regardless of whether he opposed it privately, Walla reports.
• They will probably be none too pleased, then, to hear Minister of the Meaninglessness of Existence Tzachi Hanegbi tell Radio 103 that “we are opposed to selling even one screw of one fighter jet to another country in the Middle East.”
• Yedioth Ahronoth, meanwhile, reports that the F-35 deal is just the “tip of the iceberg,” reporting an exclusive that the Mossad has been pressuring the Defense Ministry for two years to okay the sale of an advanced weapon.
• That’s why defense officials “did not fall off their chairs,” with the news of the F-35 deal, writes Alex Fishman.
• Fishman does not say what the weapon is, offering only that “it includes not only intelligence capabilities, but also smart, precision offensive arms.”