Gone Ganor: 9 things to know for March 20

1. No Benny no quit: Blue and White leader Benny Gantz broke his long near-silence with the media Monday night with a full court press of four separate interviews being published at the same time.

• The interviews to Channels 12 and 13, the Kan public broadcaster (Channel 11) and the Ynet news website pretty much all covered the same ground, with Gantz giving nearly identical answers to questions that followed pretty much the same theme.
• Agenda item No. 1, to Gantz’s dismay, appeared to be the Iranian phone hacking scandal, with the candidate insisting there was nothing sensitive leaked, saying the affair did not make him unfit to lead, and decrying the political mud fight behind the leak of the information.
• Gantz told Channel 12 news that the affair would not force him out of the race, a somewhat strange statement considering that his interviewer had not suggested it should or would.
• He also repeated his line about not working with Arab parties, telling Ynet that his party would get 40 seats and not need to rely on Arabs for a coalition.

2. Anyone but them: That scenario, already unlikely, seems even more so with a poll by the Walla news site Tuesday showing his party sinking to a new low of 29 seats, below the 31 predicted for Likud.

• “I don’t intend to call anyone who is against the State of Israel,” he told Channel 13. “Arab Israelis are equal citizens…[but] their leaders act against Israel.
• Gantz says he will be interested in joining with Arab parties on “the day their leaders bring a positive Israeli agenda into their conversation.”
• He also attempted to sharpen his message that he won’t sit in a government with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though he once again appeared to qualify that (only a day after being caught doing the same and raising a political ruckus) adding that it was unless he is not indicted. Does that include before he is actually indicted?
• As for the ultra-Orthodox, he says he is open to working with them, even though that stance is unlikely to be supported by party No. 2 Yair Lapid.
• And on the two-state solution, well he made sure yet again not to mention it, telling Channel 12 that he wants to bolster “settlements” and that he will approach peace talks only from a perspective of securing Israel.

3. Pass the dutchie to the right-hand side: The press was seemingly underwhelmed by the interviews, with them failing to garner major headlines.

• On Wednesday morning, the major print papers give them little more than a passing mention, probably thanks to the fact that not that much new or of intense interest was said beyond vague promises, with Gantz trying to make himself palatable to both Meretz and New Right voters.
• “In general I think that Blue and White people think they are up 1-0 and they are just trying to keep the lead. … in reality it’s 1-0, but Bibi is winning and it’s an insane battle for the whole field. But where are their policies? Where is the essence of the change [they want]?” Channel 13’s Nadav Eyal writes on Twitter.
• Issues can be tricky though. In Yedioth, Yaron London writes that the rise of the far-right Zehut party led by Moshe Feiglin may be thanks to the same types of voters that left Meretz in droves 27 years ago to vote for Raful Eitan’s Tzomet, which also had a libertarian vibe: voters willing to accept far-right ideology as a trade-off for a good time.
• “According to his vision, Jews and faithful Arabs can smoke weed in the shade of the Third Temple, which will be built as a private initiative and without intervention of authorities thwarting the chances of this becoming the Hong Kong of the Mideast. The unfaithful Arabs, residents of the annexed territories, will be paid off to move to another country. Life will be rock n’ roll,” he mocks.
• Zehut, by the way, was one of the few parties ruled out as a partner for Gantz, unless Feiglin “changes his thinking.”

4. Season for the treason: Gantz would have probably liked to focus on Netanyahu’s corruption, and he did manage to get a few shots in specifically regarding the submarine bribery scandal and new allegations of monkey business regarding money the PM made off shares of a company that supplied Thyssenkrupp, the German shipbuilder at the center of the scandal.

• Strangely enough, he appeared to say that Netanyahu had become corrupt in the last four years, i.e., after Gantz was no longer his army chief, even though all but one scandal surrounding the prime minister is from before 2015.
• Unfortunately for Gantz, he was quickly upstaged by the actual news that the state’s main witness in the case, former middleman Miki Ganor, had asked to retract his testimony and had been arrested.
• And on Wednesday morning he is upstaged again by party underling Moshe Ya’alon, who tells Israel Radio Netanyahu could be guilty of treason — the most serious charge that can be leveled against someone in Israel — in the case, even though he is not a suspect.
• Likud reacts by saying Ya’alon’s remark “crossed a line.”

5. Hey Miki, you’re so not fine you blow my case: Ganor’s U-turn makes the front page of all of Israel’s major dailies, sharing space alongside the killing of a Palestinian terror suspect wanted over a deadly attack Sunday.

• Yedioth Ahronoth calls Ganor’s move a “depth charge” and that the “rules of the game are now being rewritten.”
• According to Channel 13, “sources close to Ganor” said he was suffering from “severe” mental stress, but did not elaborate. Shortly after police announced his arrest, he said he was feeling unwell and was taken to a hospital.
• However there is widespread speculation that the whole move is just a ploy.
• Ganor is “trying to play chess with the investigators and prosecution in order to improve the terms of his deal and bolster his position,” Channel 13’s Doron Harman writes.
• Currently he is supposed to avoid all but a year in prison in exchange for his cooperation. Justice officials are playing hardball back, reportedly threatening to remove his immunity and send him up the river for a lot longer, while still using his testimony.
• That testimony includes some 50 interviews with police, according to Yedioth.
• In Israel Hayom, columnist Itzik Saban writes that while the main suspects in the case “can’t necessarily sleep better at night,” there is a good chance the evidence against them will be weakened by this affair.
• “Time will tell if the ‘worst corruption scandal in the nation’s history’ will turn into a farce. What is certain is that the police and prosecution have had no lack of headaches with this case,” he writes.

6. Rich uncle moneybags: Meanwhile, the press is continuing to look into the links between Netanyahu and his cousin Nathan Milikowsky, who were apparently business partners in manufacturer Seadrift Coke, and then GrafTech, which is at the center of new allegations about Netanyahu’s involvement,

• Haaretz’s Gur Megiddo, looking at the way Netanyahu has used Milikowsky’s money for decades, asks whether the prime minister’s “wallet has been found.”
• “Who is Nathan Milikowsky to Netanyahu? A donor or a business partner? Cousin or deep pocket? These are the questions that ought to concern the tax authorities.”

7. Score settled: Both Israeli tabloids play up an operation Tuesday night to capture Omar Abu Laila, wanted for a stabbing and shooting attack on Sunday that left a soldier and rabbi dead, with the apparent terrorist being killed in a firefight near Ramallah.

• Both tabloids go with the headline “Settling accounts.” Despite several days passing in which Abu Laila managed to hide out, Yedioth writes that the army managed to find and kill him “relatively quickly.”
• The newspaper reports that troops found him thanks to “intelligence gathering,” though it’s unclear how he managed to get from the northern West Bank to the Ramallah-area town where he was killed, undetected.

8. More death and destruction: Tuesday night and Wednesday morning saw another deadly incident in the West Bank during monthly clashes that accompany monthly visits of Jews to a Nablus shrine.

• The army says it shot and killed two Palestinians who opened fire from a passing car.
• However, Palestinian reports accuse the army of killing the pair in cold blood, refusing to allow medics to reach them and then bulldozing the car, possibly with them still in it.
• Pictures and videos on social media show an ambulance with bullet holes and a bulldozer operating.

⁧#صور⁩ | لحظة تحطيم جرافة الاحتلال للمركبة التي استقلها الشهيدان في المنطقة الشرقية بمدينة ⁧#نابلس⁩. pic.twitter.com/E05ZahL23r

— شبكة فلسطين للحوار (@paldf) March 19, 2019

• Haaretz’s Zvi Bar’el charges that the West Bank is one large Potemkin village, with the army, government and settlers hiding the bloody reality.
• “The bluff that they and the government have been selling the public is that there is no war in the West Bank, that everything is calm there, that we can continue to build there, start families and redeem the Land of Israel without paying any price in blood. At the same time, the Israeli army and Shin Bet security service are continually briefing the government and military reporters about expectations of an escalation, of an uprising in the offing. And some say that the escalation is already here, as if during times when there is no escalation, the situation is normal, safe and stable,” he writes.

9. Junk science: Far far away, ToI’s Melanie Lidman explores the fact that Israel is essentially littering on the moon, or wants to.

• The Beresheet spacecraft, which is set to land on the satellite next month, will perform a few experiments for a couple of days and then just become the latest piece of space trash strewn across the lunar landscape.
• “If you view the environment not only as Earth, but as the entire solar system, we need to be worried about it,” says Professor Pini Gurfil, a professor of aerospace engineering and the director of the Asher Space Research Institute at the Technion in Haifa. “You never know what a piece of junk landed on the moon will have as an impact on future science.”