Full medal racket

When it comes to predictability, sure there’s death and taxes, but in Israel there’s also outrage over being spurned by Arabs and Muslims at sporting events, massive excitement over any achievement on a world stage, and the press’s reaction to both.

Thus Sunday morning’s papers in Israel offer little in the way of surprises, after an Israeli judoka won a bronze medal hours after an Egyptian opponent refused to shake his hand, leading to identical front pages by tabloids Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth. Both A1s feature the headline “Huge!” accompanied by the same picture of Or Sasson biting down on his bronze medal on the Olympic podium.

Just as unsurprising, Haaretz doesn’t lead with the bronze medal (though it does play it high), instead opening its paper with actual journalism, in this case a follow-up to an investigative piece claiming that the state may have “disappeared” more than just Yemenite children in the 1950s.

But the main event Sunday is clearly Sasson, and the tabloids make little attempt to maintain any sort of professional distance from their subject matter.

“Anybody who saw the matches Friday in the Carioca Arena 2 couldn’t keep their eyes dry when they saw Sasson run to celebrate with his trainer Oren Smadja and with Israeli fans, wrapped in an Israeli flag and hugging everyone individually,” Israel Hayom’s Miki Sagi writes from Rio.

Yedioth reports that Sasson’s win, coupled with Yarden Gerbi’s bronze medal a few days earlier, and Israeli Judo wins in years past, has heralded the rise of an “especially good” Israeli program. But for Sasson, quoted in the paper, the win is about more than just judo.

“I’m a proud Jerusalemite. I am proud that I did this for the capital city and country that I love. A dream has come true before my eyes. I worked hard for this moment. I went through crises, losses, but I beat all the doubts and fears,” he’s quoted as saying.

Even Rio-dispatched Haaretz financial columnist Nehemia Shtrasler, no doe-eyed sap he, can’t help but be taken in by Sasson, whom he describes as a “gentle giant.”

“I don’t mean that he speaks gently, no. He says his piece loud and clear,” writes Shtrasler. “I mean that he is 120 kilograms of muscle on the one hand, but is gentle to no end, patient, good spirited and elegant on the other. And that’s the last thing you expect from a guy so strong, who takes part in a sport that is essentially a battle.”

That classiness was on full display as Egyptian Islam El Shehaby refused to shake his hand after losing a match, a story that gets nearly as much tsk-tsk’ing play as does the medal win. And the Israeli tabloid media, showing how classless it can be, seems obsessed with pointing out how much the Egyptian athlete’s move gave him a black eye around the world, while giving Israel whatever the opposite of a black eye is.

“Sasson, winning many points for Israel in front of world media and those present, tried for several seconds to keep to the rules and kept his hand outstretched toward the Egyptian, but El Shehaby stuck to his refusal and came away with boisterous boos from the crowd in the stands,” Israel Hayom reports.

Yedioth takes it a step further, festooning its pages with snapshots of worldwide media coverage of the refusal, including focusing on an article from pro-Israel group The Israel Project saying El Shehaby is a loser for refusing to shake Sasson’s hand. The paper, however, reports that the Foreign Ministry, suddenly BFF with Egypt, is not trying to capitalize on the event for brownie points, though it won’t turn them away.

The paper’s Smadar Peri points out that despite Jerusalem and Cairo enjoying a honeymoon at the top, El Shehaby’s gesture, or lack thereof, is proof that the love hasn’t trickled down to the Egyptian street. At the same time, though, she says he hasn’t exactly been welcomed as a hero at home.

“I had a hard time finding any support in the Egyptian press. When headlines spoke of ‘defeat,’ internet commenters censured El Shehaby on the double blow to Egyptian pride — both the larger loss and the poor timing,” she writes.

If the Arab world doesn’t historically have much love for Israel, it’s not as if Israel historically had much love for the Arab world, including Jews from there, as the slowly unfolding Yemenite Children affair is showing. Haaretz’s lead story Sunday morning, though, shows that it wasn’t just Jews from Arab lands, but also children of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe who may have been taken from their parents and then declared dead.

The report comes as a follow-up to an explosive story over the weekend by the broadsheet — considered the voice of the Ashkenazi elite — that first reported that Ashkenazi babies may have been taken. Over the weekend, the paper reports, some 40 families of Ashkenazi stock contacted them to say that they too had lost children in the early years of the state, significantly expanding the scope of the scandal.

“Among them are Jews who came from Lithuania, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine, including a number of Holocaust survivors,” the paper reports. “All of them told similar stories about their babies who had disappeared from various hospitals in Israel. All were told that their infants had died, but were never shown either a death certificate or a grave.”

If there’s one silver lining, it may show that the state was maybe not as discriminatory toward certain groups as earlier thought. That sentiment dovetails nicely with a column by Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein in Yedioth marking Sunday’s fast of the Tisha B’Av — the Ninth of Av — which commemorates all the various bouts of death and destruction the Jewish people have gone through over the millennia, this time without food.

The holiday is most closely associated with the destruction of the Second Temple, which Talmudic sages ascribe to baseless hatred. Riffing on that, Edelstein calls on the Israeli public to not repeat the mistakes of the past and accept with open arms the various types of people living in the modern state of Israel.

“The range of cultures and world views is a blessing and not a curse. Our challenge is not to allow the multiple opinions, which have blown up and strengthened in the social media era, to break us into subgroups that are unable to bridge the gaps between us, like the arguments between the sects of the Sadducees, Pharisees and Boethusians on the eve of the Temple’s destruction,” he writes. “Our urgent mission is to curb the rage and not give room to extremists and violence (even virtual); to see the large and rich spectrum of voices as not leading to confrontation and cacophony, but as an orchestra playing a symphony.”