Executing justice

Justice, justice you shall pursue, the Book of Deuteronomy said, and the Hebrew press’s coverage of the Silvan Shalom sex scandal and Hezbollah henchman Samir Kuntar’s assassination in Lebanon follows that biblical theme on Monday.

The papers pore over the Kuntar assassination, with analyses and reactions from bereaved members of the family he killed in 1979, and the obligatory attribution to foreign media of reports of the alleged Israeli strike that killed him. All the news reports provide details of the “Israeli airstrike” that killed him outside Damascus taken from Arab news reports.

One thing completely lacking from the reportage is a mote of contrition. Graphics with his image in crosshairs appear on all four pages of Israel Hayom‘s coverage and Yedioth Ahronoth‘s five. Haaretz, widely considered the left-most Israeli news outlet, notes that “Quntar’s assassination won’t evoke anguish from a single Israeli. The man was a seasoned terrorist.”

The first headline readers encounter in Israel Hayom’s coverage is a quote from a woman whose husband and 4-year-old daughter were murdered by Kuntar in Nahariya in 1979: “We’ve waited for this for years.” The paper’s news report on the hit only makes it to Page 9, behind the reactions.

“Historic justice was served,” Smadar Haran tells the paper.

Yedioth Ahronoth coyly writes in its opening coverage that “whoever launched the pinpoint missiles at six-story building in which Samir Kuntar was staying two nights ago knew that he was paying back an old debt to a brutal murderer.” The paper says that the assassination didn’t come out of the blue, but was aimed at thwarting an imminent threat plotted by the Hezbollah terrorist against Israeli targets. It says he had become in recent months less of a Hezbollah henchman and more of an Iranian agent. Where it gets any of this information is unspecified. To be fair, Yedioth is not alone in this; The Times of Israel’s report on these Kuntar details is equally unsourced.

Haaretz says that the assassination of Kuntar ushers in a “new era of even higher tension than normal in the triangle of borders between Israel, Syria and Lebanon.”

Kuntar’s assassination was met with rocket fire at northern Israel, and Israel Hayom pundit Yoav Limor suspects the three missiles launched at Nahariya were “just an appetizer, and that Hezbollah is expected to respond — also at the command of its master Iran, for whom Kuntar worked.”

“Kuntar the Druze, who began his path as a terrorist for Fatah and eventually transferred to Hezbollah, volunteered (for pay of course) to work in terrorism for a new boss — Iran,” Limor writes. “The response now to his assassination depends greatly on the will of his Iranian employers” — who want revenge but must also take into consideration conflicting interests, such as preserving the Assad regime in Syria and the nuclear deal with world powers.

Alex Fishman writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that Kuntar’s assassination was either the elimination of a ticking time bomb, or someone took a calculated chance and goofed. He writes that Israel will learn soon enough — in a matter of days or even hours — whether the rockets fired at northern Israel on Sunday were “a symbolic response… or that they augur the start of another round of violence on the northern border.”

“Whether or not Israel is behind the assassination, before every operation in Syria the defense minister needs to ask his intelligence people whether this action crosses a red line for Hezbollah which will oblige it to respond, likely bringing a deterioration [of security] on the northern front,” he says. Israel’s interest is to let Hezbollah drain its blood in Syria and weaken itself relative to Israel, and the IDF hit on Jihad Mughiyeh earlier this year nearly resulted in a full-blown confrontation with the Shiite group, he says.

With so much Kuntar and worries about war with Hezbollah in the news, it’s easy to forget that Interior Minister Silvan Shalom resigned amid numerous allegations of sexual harassment by former employees. The papers remedy that by putting his face on the front page and headlining the senior Likud minister’s departure from political life.

Israel Hayom calls Shalom’s announcement of his resignation “a political quake.” Yedioth Ahronoth notes that after 20 years in office, with posts as lofty as deputy prime minister, foreign minister, finance minister and interior minister, it took just four days of mounting allegations to get Shalom to say shalom.

Haaretz’s Yossi Verter jabs the knife deep into Shalom’s pride in a front page op-ed, writing that Shalom was a highly educated politician “who was always proud of his formal education” and many degrees.(According to the Foreign Ministry webpage, Shalom has a B.A. in economics, a C.P.A., an L.L.B and an M.A.)

“One thing he apparently never learned: that over the years the norms here have changed,” Verter says.

Most of the alleged sexual harassment claims took place after former president Moshe Katzav was convicted on similar charges, as well as fellow politicians Haim Ramon and Yitzhak Mordechai, and yet “didn’t the enlightened and experienced man, a lawyer in his education, learn from the bitter experience of his colleagues, the three of whom were good friends at various times?” Verter asks.

Update: The allegations against Shalom were not substantiated and the investigation was subsequently closed.