Fathers under attack

The terror comes like lightning on a clear day. One day, Israel is obsessed with Yair Netanyahu’s locker room talk and rich friends at strip clubs and the next a car is riddled with bullets, a man is dead, a village is locked down and the country is reminded of its never-ending bloody conflict with the Palestinians.

Israel has been through this countless times, and the press jumps right back into battle stations, with straight news reporting and heart-rending accounts of the family’s loss. All that’s missing is the tried-and-true punditry that normally accompanies security-related stories like this.

While Haaretz and Israel Hayom both focus their front pages on the actual attack, Yedioth Ahronoth goes straight for the heartstrings, with a front page headline reading “Six kids without a father,” next to a picture of Raziel Shevach and his progeny.

While also covering the basic facts of the incident, both Yedioth and Israel Hayom give voice to claims by area residents that they are not safe and are being left to fend for themselves by an indifferent government.

“We are sick of being sitting ducks,” reads Yedioth’s lede to its main story, quoting a resident of the Havat Gilad outpost where Raziel was from and near where the attack took place.

Israel Hayom reports that area resident Zvi Sukkot reported earlier in the week about another neighbor who stopped alongside a car with Israeli plates, thinking they needed help, and then had a gun pulled on him, though he was able to fend off his attacker and the would-be shooter took off for Nablus.

“As of last night ( a week after the incident) the terrorist has not been arrested,” Sukkot is quoted as writing on Facebook on January 8. “What we know is that there is someone with a gun who has already decided to kill who is going around freely in our area. That’s exactly how the Henkin family was killed in front of their kids on Sukkot two years ago.”

Haaretz ends its story by noting that terror attacks are actually way down in the last year, according to army numbers, and Yedioth columnist Yifat Ehrlich, herself a settler, writes about how earlier in the day she was trying to teach her kids about how Palestinians are not bad people, about the coexistence between Jews and Muslims in the Samaria region of the West Bank “and then in a moment it all breaks apart.”

Still, there isn’t any “Is it intifada time?” or “Here’s what to do about the situation” punditry or the like, with most columns still focused on the Yair Netanyahu strippergate scandal.

Haaretz’s headlines its front page story based on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that “Yair said foolish words on the recordings, we taught our kids to respect women.” But the paper notes that the younger Netanyahu was a strip club regular, according to those who work there.

“He would come here on a regular basis, with his bodyguards, he would come in through the back,” the paper quotes the owner telling Hadashot news. Another worker is quoted saying she saw him coming out a private room just two days prior.

And on the paper’s op-ed page, Samy Peretz alleges that Yair Netanyahu’s behavior, and why the public cares, indeed reflects on the prime minister.

“A nighttime conversation between three young guys — even the kids of the powerful — who had too much to drink wouldn’t be the talk of the town in a country where a prime minister acted in an normal atmosphere. But many things are not normal when talking about Benjamin Netanyahu in the last few years — starting with his links to tycoons and taking gifts from them, to crazy stories out of his residence and he and his associates being questioned and including the wild legislative attacks against the public interest,” he writes. “There is value to conversation and we can learn from it about secrets, lies and hypocrisy.”

Yedioth reports that Yair’s nights out are also the talk of the town in the strip clubs, or at the least the ones their reporter visited:

“Have you seen Bibi’s kid,’ the bartender asks before we can even get in the door. When he’s asked if he saw Yair Netanyahu visiting he quickly answers, ‘I have no idea who comes and who doesn’t’ and goes back to pouring drinks. But then he adds ‘we have a great leader. He gets his friends money and his kid knows how to party.’”

The paper also quotes a Facebook post by Yair’s ex-girlfriend, who was dating him just before the tape was made, and who now says she wishes she never had, calling him disgusting over his claim to his friends that she would provide sexual favors to repay their debts.

“We shouldn’t be surprised when sexual harassment becomes the norm for men when they talk they way we heard on the tape,” she says, basically accusing him of being another Harvey Weinstein.

Not surprisingly, Netanyahu-backing Israel Hayom sees the story completely differently, with columnists continuing to attack the media, as well as now the bodyguards who protect the Netanyahus and apparently hear the terrible things they say.

“What else has been recorded? Who else is recorded? Who else is doing recording? One can only guess at what security, financial or political information has been revealed to guards and drivers at the Prime Minister’s Office, who also sometimes accompany senior ministers and others,” Akiva Bigman writes, ignoring the whole question of whether Yair Netanyahu should have even been given a bodyguard. “And why should someone who sells gossip for ill-gotten money not do the same with more sensitive information?”