Götterdämmerung

The Israeli Hebrew press is rocking a 104° election fever in Tuesday’s papers as the US gets set to go to the polls and bring to an end a tumultuous presidential campaign. As anyone remotely familiar with the local media would expect, the American politics coverage is wallpapered with more pundits than a 24-hour cable news show. It’s full page spreads in tabloids Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth, and full above-the-fold presentation in Haaretz.

You’ve got to go into the double-digit pages in any of the major national papers just to find a scrap of local news coverage. There are explainers for those unfamiliar with the Electoral College, bios of the two main candidates and breakdowns of their positions, and Yedioth Ahronoth even brings in Danielle Berrin, who accused Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit of sexual assault, for a Jewish women’s perspective on the election.

But what’s striking is that any semblance of impartiality previously maintained in the lead-up to Tuesday’s vote is cast to the wind. Too much is at stake for Israel and the rest of the world, as summed up by the political cartoons.

Haaretz’s Amos Biderman captures the US election obsession in Israel, and in the press in particular, showing Israelis munching on falafel on Main Street, Israel and chatting about the election. “In short they need to take Pennsylvania and pray for Florida,” a woman says. “Forget it, there’s no chance he’ll lose Utah and Arizona, and you know you can’t count on North Carolina,” a man replies.

The gist is similar in Israel Hayom’s political cartoon, which shows Uncle Sam at the ballot box with the world watching and the caption “America votes.”

Yedioth Ahronoth shows Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton clambering to the end of a game of Snakes and Ladders, with the Republican making a last-ditch attempt to keep the Democrat from reaching the White House. The message is clear: After a frenetic, poisonous roller coaster of a campaign, Clinton is poised to win.

After a year of brutal mudslinging politics and deep divisions, the Israeli papers try to take stock and lay out the issues for their Hebrew readership.

One of the major rifts, says Israel Hayom, clearly demonstrating once again its unabashed skew in favor of the Republican candidate, is between “America first versus welfare state first; an America that’s proud of its past and yearns to return to the time when heavy industry was a symbol of progress, against an America that wants to start anew and create a different society.”

Before launching into a total non sequitur about the 1884 presidential elections, the paper’s Boaz Bismuth injects his personal opinion into what was ostensibly a reporting story. He shoves Clinton to the side and appears to make her seem unqualified to serve as president: “What I feel here along with thousands is that they’re essentially anti-Trump. The event in Philadelphia only sharpens the feeling that the elections are a referendum on Trump, and that it’s also a clash between Trump and President [Barack] Obama, who’s on the way here with his wife Michelle and former president Bill [Clinton]. Hillary alone is apparently not enough.”

While Yedioth’s Nahum Barnea, who was at the same rally in Philadelphia, paints a rosier picture, reflecting that “even if the predictions of the pollsters and pundits are made true and Hillary Clinton wins a large majority in the Electoral College and popular vote, the struggle for the soul of America won’t cease.” The political corruption Trump rails at is indeed real, he writes: “Billionaires and lobbyists bought and are buying key decisions in Washington with money, in clear contradiction to the national interest.”

Neither Clinton nor Trump will change that fact, but Trump’s cries “spurred on very dangerous movements in American society. They delegitimized the rule of law and the basic existence of democratic institutions; they put on the map extreme right-wing groups that were considered crazy before these elections, and gave renewed political legitimacy to racist ideas from dark eras of American history.”

“Trump doesn’t belong to these groups: He opened the door for them for opportunistic reasons,” Barnea says.

In Haaretz, Chemi Shalev calls the race between “the familiar and the reckless” a done deal. “According to all signs, all polls, almost all surveys and most of the experts and observers, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton will be elected president of the United States,” he says right off the bat. Hedging his bets, he adds, “Of course, it could be that they’re all wrong. The surveys are based on some decisive error, as has happened elsewhere in the world.” Israel, for example.

Stepping to Clinton’s defense, Shalev says that the Democratic candidate “is far from being the she-demon and big criminal as depicted in the malicious, lying and not completely sane propaganda machine of the American Right.” He adds, devoid of all bias, “She is a moderate politician from the center, with social sensitivity, which she demonstrated while Donald Trump and his father were accused by New York authorities of deliberately preventing blacks from living in buildings they owned.”