Governor’s ball

The bureaucratic appointment of Israel’s next top banker makes top news across the board in the Hebrew-language press Monday morning. The placement of the story underlines both the slowness of the news day (which ended before Gaza decided to start lighting up the south with rockets) and journalists’ insider baseball problem, in which they assume the things that interest them and their government sources are also what John Q. Reader wants to see alongside his bowl of Cariot.

The appointment gets nearly an all-around thumbs up, though some have criticism of the man who already twice steered Israel’s economy.

Both Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom play up in their headlines the fact that Frenkel is actually returning to the post for a third go, and Yedioth’s uber popular financial commentator Sever Plotzker calls his appointment a “comeback” but wonders, using a fine mix of metaphors, whether the man who oversaw Israel’s finances in the 1990s could repeat the trick given today’s challenges. “Even though he won’t have any trouble filling Stanley Fischer’s shoes, the question is whether he will need to fill those shoes … after all, you can’t enter the same river twice, and certainly not three times. New economic times call for new people.”

Israel Hayom gives readers (and Frenkel?) a handy list of the various challenges he will face upon taking office, such as guiding growth while the rest of the world is in recession, implementing the law limiting corporate concentration, keeping a real estate bubble from bursting and keeping the interest rate low. Dan Margalit thinks that if anybody is up to the challenge and is not named Stanley Fischer, it’s this dude.

“We are talking about a logical choice. It will indeed be difficult to fill the shoes of his predecessor, Stanley Fischer. His name precedes him and many finance people have often said that the governor himself raised Israel’s credit rating by a few points. Frenkel is considered around the world as being in Fischer’s league. It’s safe to assume he’ll be accepted with open arms, or at least be given a reasonable chance. But there is no more grace period in Israeli power struggles, certainly not for somebody coming into a position he held before.”

Haaretz’s Nehemia Shtrasler says forget Fischer’s tee-ball league, this guy is in a league of his own. “His appointment will send a message to the world: Israel will continue to be an island of stability, with reined-in inflation, and investment and growth above all.”

However, in Maariv former treasury director Shmuel Salvin says Frenkel, whom he worked under, is the wrong choice because of his hypercapitalist, anti-socialist viewpoints. “There are those who think, me among them, that the social gaps started to widen because of the policies he implemented.”

Palestinian idolatry

Haaretz features a report from Ramallah on the unifying joy among Palestinians with the victory of Gazan Mohammed Assaf on “Arab Idol” over the weekend. Accompanying a picture showing thousands thronging the streets of the West Bank city, Amira Hass writes that “immediately after Assaf’s win slightly before midnight, cries of joy were heard from homes and restaurants, as well as from street corners where giant screens had been set up. Streets in Gaza and Ramallah that had been nearly empty until the results were announced filled as if by magic with convoys of cars cruising through the main roads with their blinkers on, honking and playing Assaf’s songs, while children and young men leaned out of the windows making victory signs and waving Palestinian flags and banners bearing Assaf’s picture. Within a short time the yellow flags of Fatah also appeared.”

Maariv reports that 16,000 Israelis a year look to change or add on to their first name. Much of the trend stems from the Jewish tradition of adding a name when in the midst of a crisis, usually health-related. The most popular names are Shira for girls and Avraham for boys, with Sarah, Esther, Talia, David, Daniel, Noa and Moshe falling not far behind. “I thought about doing it for a long time,” a woman who changed her name to Shira tells the paper. “My self esteem rose wondrously. My former name held me back, this has done me good.”

You can drive 55

In Israel Hayom, Yehuda Safra calls for drivers to change their middle names from “danger” to “safe driver,” especially in light of summer break. “Unfortunately, the results from over the years show that Israelis don’t embrace safe driving, and just a millisecond and a millimeter are the difference between a near miss and a disaster. Now, when more than a million kids are getting out of school to the summer break, drivers needs to be a thousand times more careful than during the year.”

In Yedioth, Nahum Barnea notes that the BDS movement against Israel is only growing and asks what the country will do about it. “It’s not fair that international surveys put us at the top of most hated countries, alongside North Korea and Iran. Life isn’t always fair. The question is what the country does with this situation. Will it push away the problem or stand up to it. Will it take an Acamol painkiller pill or chemotherapy.”