High stakes gambles don’t always pay

A battle over Amona is averted after the government strikes an eleventh hour deal with the settlers of the illegal West Bank outpost, but the war is far from over. The compensation agreement for the 40 families living on the hilltop ruffles plenty of feathers in the Hebrew newspapers on Monday, who frown on the multi-million shekel payout that comes at the expense of funding healthcare, education and welfare.

At the same time, suspicions that an Arab lawmaker smuggled cell phones to imprisoned Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails competes with the Amona bailout for space on the front page. Police suspect MK Basel Ghattas of giving a dozen or more telephones to high-profile security inmates, allegedly taking advantage of his parliamentary authority to enter prisons without security checks, Yedioth Ahronoth says. Police ordered border authorities to bar him from leaving the country pending investigation, Haaretz reports, noting that his parliamentary immunity might make such a move difficult for law enforcement.

While Haaretz is more restrained in its coverage, the tabloids howl with outrage. “The Joint Spy List,” is Israel Hayom‘s baying headline (alluding to Ghattas’s Arab List faction in the Knesset), which is only outdone by Yedioth Ahronoth’s: “The suspicion: An MK in the service of terrorism.”

Yedioth puts the Balad party in the crosshairs with a Page 2 breakdown about the Arab party’s past “entanglements” with the law in Israel. Ghattas isn’t the first, it says, mentioning former lawmaker Azmi Bashara’s flight to Qatar to avoid prosecution amid allegations of espionage, and current MK Hanin Zoabi’s participation in the Mavi Marmara flotilla attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2010.

A former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoaz Hendel, writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that it’s become the norm that Balad party members are “representatives of the state’s citizens one day, and the next are exposed as collaborators with the worst of its enemies.”

“Truth be told,” Hendel writes, “there are Arab-Israeli elected officials whose entire time and efforts are dedicated to destroying any chance of integrating the Arab minority into the Jewish national state.” Ghattas, he charges, is one of them. “As a lesson from the past: it’s worthwhile to pay attention where Ghattas travels in the coming days. There’s a tendency to disappear in Qatar.”

Israel Hayom’s op-ed by Nadav Shragai is even more accusatory. It asks, in its provocative headline, “To whom have the Arab MKs sworn allegiance?” He points out that Ghattas is suspected spy Bashara’s cousin, as if that is complicity enough in treasonous activity, “and several of his colleagues have behaved more than once as if they are members of the Palestinian parliament in Ramallah and not members of the Knesset in Israel.” The proof is in the pudding.

Pointing out the identity conflict of Israel’s Arab minority (and thoughtfully noting that the vast majority are law-abiding citizens who just want to live their lives in peace and quiet), he concludes that “some of the Arab MKs indeed are several times more loyal to the Palestinian cause and its emissaries — some of them murderers and terrorists — than the Knesset of Israel.”

“Only a state that is off the rails and cannot draw a clear line between free speech and democracy and between incitement and terrorism will allow these MKs to continue to serve in its parliament,” Shragai writes.

As far as Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth are concerned, the state is off the rails, but not because of Basel Ghattas. Yedioth Ahronoth is nearly incandescent with indignation that the state is paying each of the 40 families from Amona a million shekels in compensation to leave their homes peacefully, despite the court order to leave the Palestinian property. In all, the paper says, the cost of removing the 40 families, compensating them, and housing them will exceed NIS 150 million — nearly a million dollars per household. The funds for it will come from a sweeping 1.3% budget cut to all government offices that is earmarked for founding the new public broadcaster and financing ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.

Perhaps in an effort to downplay the government’s capitulation to a tiny, vocal and quasi-violence-threatening minority on a windswept hilltop in the West Bank, Israel Hayom buries the Amona compromise beneath its reportage on convicted rapist and former president Moshe Katsav’s imminent release from prison on parole. The paper doesn’t mention the astronomical figure cited by Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz; it only drops the sum of NIS 40 million for the local council to be given to the families in compensation. The overall cost of standing down isn’t brought up.

Haaretz’s Yossi Verter paints Netanyahu as the capitulator-in-chief, who buckled “just a week after he presented [Amona residents] with a deal to evacuate which he worked on for many weeks — which they rejected… All this for the sake of making it easier for these criminals to leave the area in quiet without causing him inconvenience,” Verter says.

A week after a report came out showing income inequality and poverty in Israel was the highest among the developed countries of the OECD, he says, the government gives the law-breaking residents of Amona a huge kickback at the expense of social services.