Defending and denouncing the ‘hipster’ critic

A freak car accident that left three dead in Tel Aviv grips the tabloids on Sunday, while former prime minister Ehud Barak’s relentless assault on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to make headlines.

After lashing out at the prime minister on Thursday at the Herzliya Conference, Barak doubled down in a weekend TV interview, saying that Netanyahu was “off the rails” and “must be replaced,” Haaretz reports on its front page. For good measure, Yedioth Ahronoth throws in criticism by the sister of a soldier killed in Lebanon who charges “Netanyahu told me that this is my brother’s tank,” after the Prime Minister’s Office denied that Netanyahu said Russia gave back the same exact tank lost in Sultan Yacoub.

“(They don’t) respect the will of the voter: The left and the generals in an undemocratic lesson,” screams a white-on-red banner across the top of Israel Hayom — a plug for a two-page op-ed defending the prime minister against his former defense ministers. The tirade in response to criticism of the prime minister by former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon and former prime minister Ehud Barak opens with a facetious rebuke of the right for winning democratic elections.

“The expansion of the government gave the signal for an unprecedented charge under the slogan ‘Anyone but Netanyahu.’ Why? Because democracy, in the eyes of [his] opponents, has one meaning: their presence in government. They’re the good, the beautiful, the kind, the acceptable. And everyone who joins their side — their sins are erased as if they never were,” Boaz Bismuth and Amos Regev say.

In their blunderbuss attack on Ya’alon, Barak and everybody else who defies Netanyahu, they proclaim that Israel has never been safer, dismiss the Saudi peace initiative as bunk, and maintain there’s no international isolation of Israel whatsoever.

“The new trend is also to brandish [the term] fascism. Jeez, really. Everyone on the left sees himself as Bertolt Brecht, everyone wants to be a martyr in the style of the days of Weimar,” they write. “But that’s just it, they’re not, and every comparison is ridiculous, absurd and laughable.” The only law passed that curbs free speech, they say, is the one against Israel Hayom, which was supported by left-wing free speech advocates.

“A threat to democracy is when the will of the nation isn’t respected,” they charge. “It’s legitimate to want to be in power, it’s legitimate to try to topple the government, it’s legitimate to criticize, it’s legitimate to want to win in elections.”

“But that’s it, that the elections were a short while ago, and there aren’t any new elections yet. And until we change this unruly nation, let’s assume that the government will continue to operate. Is that hard for Barak, hard for Ya’alon, hard for the left? Deal with it.”

From the other side of the aisle, Sima Kadmon writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that she hasn’t forgotten that Barak is an opportunist who served in Netanyahu’s government and split the Labor Party. That being said, she concedes that the “hipster,” “Robinson Crusoe” former prime minister is right. Despite his “outrageous performance,” “Barak apparently among the last who indeed understands the depth of the danger of Netanyahu.”

“If only it weren’t Barak who said those things, but people within Netanyahu’s government,” she says. “But that apparently won’t happen, or will happen only when Netanyahu is bleeding on the floor.” Thankfully there are people who are willing to speak out for what’s right, she says, even if it’s Ehud Barak.

Whereas Kadmon offers more cautious praise of Barak, Haaretz’s editorial throws its weight behind the former defense ministers who spoke out against the prime ministers.

“In Israel the defense minister is the true second-in-command to the prime minister in the most critical area, and if all those who served in this position denounce the behavior of the person who appointed them and who depended upon them, then the problem is necessarily with him, not his critics,” it says.

With Avigdor Liberman as his newest defense minister, Netanyahu’s conduct is “reckless and dangerous,” and he’s dragging Israel into needless military conflicts while jeopardizing valuable partnerships, such as the one with [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas.”

The outsiders’ criticism of Netanyahu is important in forming a “broad resistance front, within the Knesset and without, to replace the government and prevent the grave damage by Netanyahu and Liberman,” Haaretz says.

Three are dead and seven injured after a driver on Ben Yehuda Street reportedly suffered a heart attack and plowed into a crowded sidewalk. “The car threw my daughter through the air and cut my husband in half,” is Yedioth Ahronoth’s headline, which quotes a grieving woman who was hurt in the accident. Just a week and change after a deadly terror shooting across town, witnesses said they feared far worse.

“We lay on the floor, we thought it may have been a terrorist attack,” the wife of the restaurant owner tells Haaretz.

The pictures from the scene that are splattered across the front pages show a black Audi surrounded by wreckage, the police swarming the scene of the accident.

“If a foreigner had passed the intersection of Ben Yehuda and Idelson Streets last night, they would have surely thought they encountered the site of a terrorist attack,” Israel Hayom’s Avi Cohen writes in something that approximates an op-ed. He says that car accidents are a blight that claims hundreds of lives each year in Israel, “and it would appear that there’s almost nothing that can be done.”

What kind of “crazy reality” do Israelis live in, however, that eyewitnesses thought it was a terrorist deliberately ramming his car into a restaurant, he asks. What exactly the point of his Page 3 article remains unclear.

Haaretz reports on the European Union’s foreign ministers upcoming meeting to vote in support of the French peace initiative, a proclamation that will give a shot in the arm to Paris’s efforts to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Israeli officials tell Haaretz that the Foreign Ministry failed to prevent the EU foreign ministers’ motion from being passed, and that it’s now focusing efforts on getting them to soften the announcement’s language.

“Everyone agrees with us in principle that direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians are preferable,” an unnamed senior official in Jerusalem tells Haaretz. “But in practice, they’re ignoring our objections to the French initiative. Most states don’t understand our position.”