Full-court press

In 1978, then prime minister Menachem Begin triumphantly crowed, “There are judges in Jerusalem,” after winning a court battle over expropriating land to build a settlement.

Nearly 40 years later, there are still judges in Jerusalem, but it seems they are not quite as kind to Begin’s successors, as proved by two court cases that ended up with big losses for a current and former prime minister Wednesday, both of which garner top placement in Hebrew papers Thursday morning.

An NIS 170,000 decision against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara Netanyahu over mistreatment of a worker at the Prime Minister’s Residence makes the front pages of both Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz.

Haaretz plays the story straight, quoting extensively from the judgment, which not only found that ex-caretaker Menny Naftali suffered abuse, but that the Netanyahus’ efforts to quash his claims were out of line.

“It’s unfortunate she decided to slander workers without any basis,” reads one choice passage from the ruling on Sara Netanyahu’s behavior highlighted by the paper.

Yedioth Ahronoth, known for its lack of love for the Netanyahus, covers the story with a bit more color, seemingly almost to the point of gloating.

“Mrs. Netanyahu ran the Prime Minister’s Residence with an iron fist,” reads the paper’s headline, a quote from the judge’s decision.
The headline sets the tone for the coverage, which focuses more on the judge’s harsh words for Sara Netanyahu and less on the actual judgment.

“’A bleak picture’ – that’s the phrase chosen by judge Dita Pruginin of the regional labor court in Jerusalem to describe the bench’s conclusion about what happened in the residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” the story starts off.

Columnist Nahum Barnea, normally pretty level-headed and cool, pens a love letter in which he goes all googly-eyed for Naftali, hailing him as a hero who stood up to the Netanyahus and won the day, and pretty much coming out and accusing the prime minister of graft.

“He cracked the Teflon. One brave man challenged Netanyahu, his lawyers, his publicists, the people who do his bidding in the prosecutor’s office and the Prime Minister’s Office. Unlike his predecessors, he couldn’t be bought off. His victory signals the way forward for others, who were warned off by the battery built around Netanyahu and his cronies,” he writes. “I don’t just mean former workers at the Prime Minister’s Residence. Netanyahu is economy minister and communications minister, on top of being prime minister, foreign minister and minister for regional collaboration. The economic and political power he has concentrated in his hands in extraordinary. Power corrupts: the more power, the more corruption. He disburses these days, in fact, hundreds of millions of shekels, if not more, to businesspeople close to him, at the expense of businesspeople who are less close.”

Not surprisingly, the story is buried on page 13 by Israel Hayom, which is seen by many as a Netanyahu mouthpiece. The paper still covers the case, though, and gives wider play to the Netanyahu’s response than its two competitors.

By wider play, what is meant is the paper makes a whole story out of copy-pasting the Netanyahu response in full, somehow crediting two reporters for pushing CTRL+C and CTRL+V.

Even the headline “The picture painted by the decision is far from the reality of the Prime Minister’s Residence” is a quote.

Faustian plea bargain

The tabloid is less forgiving, and less copy-and-paste happy, regarding the imposition of an extra month of jail time on former prime minister Ehud Olmert, which garners front page treatment.

Knowing that most readers don’t care about the in and outs of an obstruction of justice case, whether it involves Olmert or Yossi Buzaglo from down the street, the paper helpfully highlights a number of key quotes from the decision, in which the judge castigated Olmert and refused to accept the plea bargain he had reached that would have seen him avoid extra time behind bars.

Just like Yedioth for Netanyahu, Israel Hayom seems almost gleeful at Olmert’s bad break.

“Ehud Olmert may have thought he managed to get a good deal. The prosecution also thought so. But Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Avital Chen had no intention of letting the former prime minister get off for obstruction of justice without prison time,” the paper reports.

And just as Barnea went weak-kneed for Naftali, the hero in this case is Judge Chen, whom columnist Dan Margalit praises for his fresh-eyed approach to the case, which allowed him to ignore the weary prosecution’s Faustian bargain with the devilish Olmert.

“The difference between the sides in the plea bargain and Chen is like the difference sages find between a new student and one who has been studying by rote. The fresh are like a clean slate, the sages taught, and the veterans are just old pages written over,” he writes. “Those who have closely followed the biggest white-collar crime scandal ever in the country came to the obstruction case filled with the Holyland and cash envelopes affairs and other dirty deeds, but Chen was able to concentrate on the one part he had been tasked with, and only that.”

One could make a case that even more important than the justice system is the court of public opinion, and one doozy of a gaffe Wednesday night has Likud MK Anat Berko losing big in that arena.
Berko’s claim in the Knesset plenum that there is no “P” in Arabic and therefore no Palestine wins a round of jeers from Yedioth Ahronoth, which exults in the gift that landed in its lap.

Had this been any old lawmaker, the populace may have chuckled and moved on, but the fact that Berko is an academic who has spent her life studying the Palestinians, and has gotten closer to many convicted Palestinians terrorists than any other Israeli as part of her research, makes her ripe for the mocking.

The paper highlights Berko’s academic career as well as her previous army career and the fact that she now serves on the high-powered Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, with the clear message that they expected better from her.

And after explaining why she’s wrong (Palestinians don’t call it Palestine, but Falastine or sometimes Filistine), the tabloid fills out its report with a play by play of Berko’s speech, which garnered some instant feedback:

“MK Tamar Zandberg protested when she heard Berko’s words and yelled out ‘What is this? Did you hear this?’ Berko wasn’t impressed and went back to her claim several times. ‘There’s no P, no P, PPP.’ Zandberg shot back: ‘Do you not have a brain?’ and Berko stood firm: ‘Those are the facts, I’ll send you it, it’s all okay.’ Since Zandberg raised the attention of the Arab MKs of her words, they staged a walkout, even as she was stuttering ‘PPP,’ as proof that they can say the letter P.”

Berko’s tirade likely won’t garner much notice in the international media, but if it did, you can be sure somebody in Jerusalem would complain about biased reporting. That was the point of a special Knesset hearing on Tuesday, which called on the foreign press corps to answer for its supposed anti-Israel bias.

Haaretz, despite being townies, sides with the gaggle of correspondents stationed in Israel and calls in its lead editorial for the country to stop its “inquisition” of foreign press.

“Foreign journalists are under constant pressure from the authorities here to provide TV viewers, newspaper readers and radio listeners abroad with a version that is as close as possible to official propaganda,” the paper reports. “This situation is exacerbated in times of emergency and distress, especially after Israel’s government has declared war on an elusive enemy – ‘incitement.’ Anyone who dares to bring the other side’s – the Palestinians’ – version is suspected of being hostile to Israel. Foreign journalists have become accustomed to harassment, which achieves the opposite purpose – not deterrence, but sympathy with other abused parties.”