Fam fatale

Depending on your relatives, saying someone is like family can be a compliment or an insult.

It’s likely that US Ambassador David Friedman meant it as a nice thing when he described US-Israel ties thusly on the front page of Israel Hayom, but with concerns over police violence at the center of media attention, the family looks more like the Sopranos than the Brady Bunch.

Israel is not the US, and the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim is not Missouri, but nonetheless, police overreach seems to be a problem in both countries Monday.

Pictures of police using water cannons and batons on ultra-Orthodox men protesting against the army draft are on all three front pages Monday morning, though only Yedioth Ahronoth runs with it as the lead.

Like the 5-O, the populist paper — seen as a bastion of the secular-traditional Israeli mainstream — has never shown much patience for protests by the ultra-Orthodox over being called up to the army, and even on Monday, with a main picture showing a horse trampling on Haredi men on the ground, its vague main headline, “Trampling under the legs of the law,” leaves it unclear who it thinks is doing the trampling.

Perhaps taking inspiration from a certain president’s “both sides” stance on Charlottesville violence (hey, he’s family), the paper reports that “at a certain point the demonstration became violent. On one side are protesters who disturbed the peace and on the other are police who seemingly used excessive violence and disproportionate force against the demonstrators.”

Israel Hayom, which normally comes to the defense of police when they are accused of violence against Arabs, this time has no truck with the cops’ behavior, with a Haim Shine op-ed on the front page accusing them of excessive force.

“If we saw pictures like that of them breaking up a protest of Jews in Europe, the thresholds would have shaken and the headlines in the Israeli media would have accused the foreign police of blatant anti-Semitism. If they acted the same way against protesters from the Arab or Bedouin community, leftist journalists in Israel would have demanded an investigative panel and accused the police of being racist,” he writes.

Shine does have a point if one looks at Haaretz, the flagship paper of the left, which plays down the Haredi protest in a small box at the bottom of page one and then deep inside the paper. Instead the broadsheet leads off with reports that the Supreme Court okayed rules forbidding certain government offices from employing asylum-seekers, as well as a preview of the Israel-US family’s two dads Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump getting together later Monday.

The paper notes that while Trump wants the visit to focus on both Iran and Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Netanyahu only has one of those subjects on his mind.

“Senior Israeli officials noted that Netanyahu would prefer that the meeting with Trump focus primarily on Iran. Netanyahu will try to persuade the president to work toward withdrawing the United States from the nuclear agreement between Iran and the great powers, which would effectively scuttle it,” the paper reports.

Columnist Chemi Shalev calls the meeting a get-together of the “Barack Obama victims club,” delving deep into the psychological scars left on each leader by the 44th US president and guessing that Netanyahu will try to push Trump’s buttons by using their mutual distaste of the former president.

“Perhaps he’ll subtly remind Trump that the North Korean nuclear program is registered under the names of several previous presidents, and its resolution won’t be viewed as a direct hit on Obama’s legacy. If you want to be a real man, Netanyahu could intimate, take care of the nuclear deal with Tehran and of the growing Iranian presence in Syria. A strong message from the Middle East would certainly reach Pyongyang as well as Barack Hussein,” he writes. “In normal times, Netanyahu should have shied away from blatantly and publicly pushing the US president into a clash that could put American soldiers in harm’s way. But his own obsession with the Iran deal, his wish to settle an old score with Obama and possibly his hope to deflect attention away from his criminal troubles back home – the two leaders could certainly exchange notes on that topic – could push Netanyahu, not for the first time, to miscalculate.”

Yedioth previews Netanyahu’s speech to the UN, reporting on rumors that he may employ Persian in a direct address to the Iranian people. Also possible previewing a point Netanyahu will make in his meeting and during his UN speech, columnist Alex Fishman surmises that the link between North Korea and Iran two is deeper than Netanyahu’s and Trump’s Obama-bruised egos.

“In the last few years a trend has been seen. The money and knowledge flow from Iran to North Korea, especially on the nuclear front. Where Iran is not able, because of the inspection regime on its land, to develop its nuclear program — it does it in a country like North Korea, where IAEA inspectors were kicked out of several years ago,” he writes. “All the big experts told Israel how complicated it was to transfer nuclear material onto a warhead. And along comes North Korea saying not only were they mistaken, but they caused Western leaders to miscalculate. Now IAEA inspectors are looking for Iranian experts in facilities under inspection in Iran, but they are not there — they are in North Korean labs.”

The two countries may be working together, but it’s not like they are family like Israel and the US, as Friedman, the US envoy, tells Israel Hayom in an interview played up on the paper’s front page. And like any good family, this one apparently also doesn’t miss a chance to snipe and gossip about the travails of the messed-up family next door.

In this overly extended analogy that refers to the Palestinians, who made a move toward resolving differences between Hamas and Fatah Sunday. According to the paper’s Oded Granot, though, the reconciliation is nothing more than a paper camel.

“The truth is that the deal between Fatah and Hamas, between Ramallah and Gaza, still hasn’t come together and is far from it. Hamas is sure that [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas is an illegitimate leader, who won’t run for re-election and who pushes illegitimate policies of cooperation and security coordination with Israel,” he writes. “Fatah understands that Hamas not only doesn’t intend to cede control of the Strip and give it to Abbas, but that it is also committed to taking over the West Bank and deposing Abbas in favor of [Hamas head] Ismail Haniyeh.”