Death blow

Israeli athlete Sagi Muki’s defeat in Olympic judo in Rio de Janeiro, the final blow to Israel’s Monday medal hopes, gets the front page across the board on Tuesday.

The photos used by the Hebrew papers tell the whole story: Muki being pummeled in midair, a victorious Georgian judoka celebrating as Muki lies on the mat, Muki in tears.

It must be a slow day because both of the tabloids devote columns to interpreting Muki’s loss, even though other Israeli medal hopes still remain at the games, with the key word in both cases being “honor.”

“The Jewish people have suffered enough,” Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea says. “But there won’t be a medal.” His quip linking Jewish suffering to the Olympic Games is apparently a reference to this classic sketch by the comedy group Hahamishia Hakamerit:

“There was something honorable in the way Sagi Muki and his trainer Oren Smadja explained the events of the day,” he says. “They didn’t ask for any slack because of the injury Muki suffered from or because of his difficulty in training in recent weeks or the epidural shots he received.”

Israel Hayom’s Dan Margalit waxes poetic about how in the good ol’ days, Israel was proud to just “lose with dignity” in international sports. “The common Israeli is so excited by appearances of the country’s teams in the Olympics, and so wants to hear the tune of the Hatikva accompanying the winners, that they’re among the few who bought tickets to the judo competition, and across the globe millions hear the undying cry ‘Go, go Israel,'” he says in his poetic fashion, “yesterday as well, when Sagi Muki finished a successful day of judo battles with burning losses.”

In a rare moment of criticism, he says it’s unfortunate that the state doesn’t make sports a priority, pointing out that it loses out to “limited options” — namely the heaps of funds given to defense. “Now it’s won every now and again, and every medal earns encouragement and pride, but it’s a long way before it’s a sport powerhouse. We can suffice with pride in what there is.”

But while the tabloids loll and wallow in self-pity over the Olympic Games, Haaretz focuses on issues at home. It highlights how the Defense Ministry backtracked on its comparison of the Iran nuclear deal to the 1938 Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany after pressure from the United States.

Haaretz points out that Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman learned the hard way and had to offer an apology for the first time in seven years as a senior minister. The paper speculates that the target of Friday’s statement by the Defense Ministry wasn’t US President Barack Obama, nor was it Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, in order to show that “policy is set by the minister’s office and not by the chief of staff’s.” The reason for his backtrack, the paper says, was Washington’s anger during negotiations for the largest military aid package in US history — should it fail it would be on Liberman’s head.

Yedioth Ahronoth makes the effort to point out that the original Defense Ministry message on Friday was a deliberate attack on Obama, whereas the revised statement goes to great lengths to express Israel’s “deep appreciation for the United States and for the president of the United States, for their tremendous contribution to Israel’s national security.”

Perhaps to save the Netanyahu government face, Israel Hayom keeps the issue off the front page and buries it on Page 11, after an article ragging on the Palestinian Authority for firing a Palestinian who helped an Israeli family injured in a terror attack.

After the enormous brouhaha over the establishment of a new public broadcasting authority, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expresses his regret at forming the new body, saying that the issue “escaped my attention” because of the 2104 war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Haaretz reports on its front page.

He reportedly asked “what if all the employees [of the new public broadcaster] are members of Breaking the Silence?” — a left-wing organization that gathers testimony from former IDF soldiers about their service, which has been the target of Netanyahu’s ire since the 2014 war. After all, the new broadcaster’s senior editorial staff won’t be hand-picked by politicians, as they are in the current Israel Broadcasting Authority.

Neither Israel Hayom nor Yedioth Ahronoth touch the story.

Yedioth Ahronoth instead tells its readers that the salmonella-infected cornflakes that have dominated the news cycle the past week will be used to produce concrete, since most other options — compost, incineration, feeding to animals — would have deleterious effects.