Greeting Grunis and grousing over gas

Judges and jumping gas prices feature prominently on Israeli pages today, much like yesterday, and probably (at least for the gas) tomorrow as well.

The end of Dorit Beinisch’s term as Supreme Court president gets first or second billing in all the papers. Both Israel Hayom and Maariv run the same picture of Beinisch and Grunis kissing on the cheek during her retirement ceremony, though where Maariv sees the end of an era, Israel Hayom sees the beginning of another.

“End of the Barak-Beinisch era, Grunis is sworn in as president,” Maariv screams from its front page, seeing the terms of Beinisch and her predecessor Aharon Barak as two halves of the same whole. Shai Golden, writing in the paper, sees the handover of the gavel as the harbinger of a major change in the courts: “It was the passing of the torch from one Israel -– distant, closed off and entrenched — to another Israel, that strongly claims for itself what it sees as rightfully its, sometimes behind closed doors, and sometimes amid the din of the tumultuous Knesset plenum.”

Yedioth Ahronoth takes a softer approach, featuring a picture of Beinisch and her baby granddaughter, with the tag Grandma Beinisch. Writing an appreciation of her work in the paper, Eitan Haber compares her to the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, “so the anti-democratic water won’t wash over everybody.”

In other news, Israeli papers report, gas pumps are gearing up to start displaying a new first digit at midnight: 8. Gas prices, which are controlled in Israel, though apparently not very well, will be rising again to NIS 8.05 a liter.

Israel Hayom has a depressing chart showing the rise of prices at the pump since January 2009 (when it was 4.75 a liter)! Columnist Hezi Sternlicht sees the rise in cost as a problem, but also an opportunity to get out of the cycle of temporary salves for high prices. “The root of the problem is that gas prices go up because of world crises. This time it’s tensions with Iran, last time it was Venezuela, sometimes it’s some rebellious African country… there are different steps that can be taken to lessen the harsh decree. It’s possible to promote ridesharing (carpools). Or resources can be put into public transportation to get it up to European levels,” he writes.

The papers report that Netanyahu wants the Finance Ministry to find a solution to the problem, but the ministry is pretty set on leaving prices where they are, high taxes and all.

Of course paying 8.05 doesn’t have to be every driver’s fate. Prices for self-serve are 21 agorot cheaper a liter, and Yedioth has a handy-dandy map showing where stations are offering steep discounts of a few agorot. Besides Eilat (where there is no VAT), drivers in the North can find prices as cheap as 7.20-something a liter, with one station in Haifa boasting prices as low as 7.10.

Getting ready for AIPAC

Haaretz leads things off with a humdinger of a story saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will ask US President Barack Obama to threaten an attack on Iran. The story, coming on the heels of a report in the same paper that President Shimon Peres would tell Obama Israel did not want to attack Iran, claims that at a meeting between Netanyahu and Obama on March 5, the Israeli premier will publicly harden his stance against Tehran. Together with Israel Hayom, Haaretz reports that intense preparations are under way to ensure that the sides come out of the meeting with a joint understanding, despite gaps in the two countries’ views on Iran’s program.

Yedioth has a report that a 70-year-old American woman was attacked in Jerusalem by a group of ultra-Orthodox men because she was teaching Judaism to non-Jews who wished to convert. Police believe the attack was meant to send a message. “You are corrupting the neighborhood with your missionary material,” she says the attackers told her.

Speaking of the holy city, it’s about to get more crowded, Maariv reports. The capital will soon welcome its 1 millionth resident. The city stands at 933,113 people as of “today,” and is adding some 80,000 people a year. In 2011, 46,527 babies were born into the cadre of Jerusalemites, and another 35,364 people chose to move to the city. “Jerusalem today is essentially a network of massive neighborhoods, like Gilo and Ramot, and every neighborhood has its own life,” writes Eli Amir.

The spy who was photographed too much

In Yedioth, Eitan Haber writes a historical op-ed telling the story of Wolfgang Lutz, a German member of the Wehrmacht arrested in Egypt in 1965, or so that’s what Egypt thought. In fact, the head of the Mossad told Israeli journalists that Lutz was actually an Israeli spy by the name of Zeev Gur Aryeh from north Tel Aviv. “I called you here to request that the picture of Lutz, which has been published in papers around the world, not be published here, by us, by your newspapers,” the Mossad head told the journalists at the time, according to Haber. “He’s known by many in Israel. If you publish his picture he’ll be identified.” Today, in the age of the Internet, Haber writes, it would have been impossible to protect his identity.

Israel Hayom also has an op-ed about pictures in papers, though Yishai Goldflam focuses on the photographer and not the subject of the picture. He questions if photojournalists should stand by rock-throwing Palestinians, waiting for them to strike and then happily standing back and snapping away to catch the drama, as happened recently near Hebron. “Rocks kill. We were reminded of that when Asher Palmer and his infant son Yonatan were killed on the very same road by a rock thrown at their car. The question is whether the next photographer that captures a murder by pushing a button, and whose picture will win prizes, will be able to claim afterward that ‘my hands did not spill this blood.’”

Haaretz’s lead editorial is an appreciation of Dorit Beinisch and a hope that her legacy will balance out Asher Grunis, who is too conservative for the lefty paper: “Beinisch tried to maintain a balance between the general and the specific during a period when collective rights became elusive and political and social polarization intensified,” the paper writes.