Dueling fronts: 7 things to know for July 26

1. Like a hellish seesaw, Israel seems to be rocking from conflict on its northern border to conflict on its southern border at dizzying speed, with Wednesday seeing worrying engagements on both fronts.

• The more serious confrontation was arguably on the Gaza border, where days of relative calm gave way to sniper fire on troops guarding the fence, snowballing into deadly strikes on Hamas posts and overnight rocket fire on southern Israeli towns.
• After fresh sirens early Thursday morning and Iron Dome shooting down a rocket, the army announced it identified nine rockets shot at Israel since the night before.
• Israel did not carry out de rigueur airstrikes overnight in response to the rocket fire, which may indicate that a late-night meeting between Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and other security chiefs may have birthed a new strategy.
• Liberman is expected to speak at an army induction center later today, Israel Radio reports, where he is set to address the escalation in violence.
• Hamas, meanwhile, announced it is putting its fighters on the “highest alert” according to Channel 10 news.

2. More worrying, however, may be two rockets shot from Syria apparently landing in the Sea of Galilee, as the lake was full of boaters and beachgoers enjoying one of the hottest days in recent memory.

• The missiles were apparently shot by the Islamic State, and Israel responded by bombing the launcher.
• But many are still troubled by the fact that the rockets made it through Israel’s supposedly advanced air defense array, which managed to shoot down a zooming jet just a day earlier.
• Yedioth reports that an investigation has been launched into why interceptors were not activated. A statement from the army to the paper seems to indicate, though, that the missile defense systems are just not ready: “Due to the non-hermetic nature of the air defense system, the rockets were not shot down.”
• The paper says Israel narrowly avoided a mass casualty event and eyewitnesses tell Hadashot news just how close it was, with the projectiles landing in the water just a few hundred feet away.
• “We heard a whistling,” one local recalls. “And then a second whistling. And then we saw [one of the missiles] falling into the water, maybe 50 meters from the beach.”

3. The dual nature of the threats from Syria and Gaza and the challenges they pose are not lost on the press.

• “Two fronts,” reads Israel Hayom’s top headline.
• One sign of the multiplicity of fronts is a tweet from US envoy Jason Greenblatt defending Israel’s right to defend itself, with so many enemies that he does not bother naming which.

https://twitter.com/jdgreenblatt45/status/1022271938008412161

• Yedioth’s Yossi Yehoshua writes that both cases were similar in that they involved snafus by Israel, and were carried out by groups not in control: IS in Syria and some small non-Hamas group in Gaza, and so he defends Israel’s decision, at least in Syria, to hit not only those in charge, but the actual perp as well.
• “They need to exact a heavy price from the groups who carried out the attacks, so they understand that incidents like this won’t be tolerated,” he writes.

4. Two days after Yedioth revealed a NIS 30 billion missile defense plan, and one day after a defense source told that same paper the plan was bollocks and nothing but electioneering, Israel Hayom now has a report on another largest defense deal.

• The paper reports that Israel is mulling a deal to buy $11 billion worth of aircraft from Boeing, include new advanced F-15 fighter jets, mid-air refueling tankers and transport helicopters.
• Though the army has started upgraded its fighter squadron to F-35s, the paper hints that it may be forced into buying F-15s to get the other aircraft, which are what it really needs.
• “Given that, in order to keep good contact with Lockheed Martin and the F-35 project, it seems Israel will also continue to buy a small amount of F-35s,” the paper reports.

5. Scandals surrounding commitment to freedom of the press are popping up in both Israel and the US.

• In the US, the hubbub is around a CNN reporter, who had been the pool designee, being disinvited from a press availability because she asked Trump a question during a photo op. Everyone jumps to her defense, even Fox News’s Bret Bauer, who does not often criticize the White House.
• In Israel, the bad guy is the Jerusalem Report (published by the Jerusalem Post), which fired cartoonist Avi Katz over a caricature he drew parodying a picture of MK Oren Hazan taking a selfie with other lawmakers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to celebrate the passing of the nation-state bill.
• The picture had been poignant enough, but Katz took it to a new level by turning it into a scene from “Animal Farm,” with all of the lawmakers drawn to look like pigs.
• Several former Post staffers and other Israeli journalists have rushed to Katz’s defense, with some accusing the Post/Report of failing to respect freedom of the press.

The sacking of Avi Katz is a disgrace https://t.co/bwbahbzlJF

— Matthew Kalman (@MatthewKalman) July 26, 2018

Israel's Minister of Culture Miri Regev calls people cancers and cockroaches and lives to pass the Nation-state law… but the Jerusalem Post fired cartoonist Avi Katz for what he called "My cartoon on Israel's shameful new Nationalism Law." Shame. pic.twitter.com/wc9BN4WJm8

— Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي (@NTarnopolsky) July 25, 2018

I broke into journalism with Avi Katz – I scripted his comic strip, "Bar-Nun," about a family of olim back in 1989-90 in The Nation, a shortlived English language Israeli daily. He has the comic artist's gift of creating familiar worlds, and he loves Israel. https://t.co/nhfjoqNtLc

— Ron Kampeas (@kampeas) July 25, 2018

• One contributor, Haim Watzmann, even resigned in protest.

• And Eli Valley, another cartoonist who got blacklisted (from the Forward), writes:

*The Jerusalem Report, owned by JPost but presumed to be less of a right-wing rag, but pigs are everywhere: https://t.co/EWfSsOJlRG

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) July 25, 2018

6. Meanwhile, the outcry in the Druze community against the law is not dying down.

• In Yedioth, former MK Shakib Shanan, a member of the community (whose son was killed in a terror attack while serving in the police), says that by passing the law, Israel was destroying the beautiful relationship it had built with its Druze citizens.
• “Leave the law, just add a clause that preserves the rights of its non-Jewish citizens and promise them full equality,” he writes. “We won’t be second-class citizens.”

7. Le Monde, running a series on spy agencies and the cities where they operate, reports that Paris has become the Mossad’s favorite stomping ground.

• The paper reports that an infamous 2010 assassination of Hamas arms dealer Mahmoud Mabhouh in Dubai was actually directed from a Paris hotel room. The story indicates that France found out about Mossad operating on its soil, and offered to keep mum in exchange for information sharing.
• While the story has gotten barely any play in Israel, in France it has aroused some fresh bitterness against Jerusalem for using France and risking Palestinian reprisals against it.
• “Real allies, how?” writes one blog.