Hot car, hot seat, hot water

Three people on the front pages of the Israeli newspapers were having a particularly bad day Sunday, bad enough to become front page news in a country full of bad news. One was the prime minister, who’s evidently walked into a diplomatic morass, the other is a father who lost a child due to a senseless act, and the third is a mayor who’s been stricken from reelection before any court found him guilty of a crime.

Yedioth Ahronoth reports that the US is enraged at Israel for a possible diplomatic faux pas committed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this year during his trip to China. According to the paper, Beijing threatened to cancel the PM’s visit unless he ordered senior security officials not to testify in a terror trial in the US against the Bank of China. These testimonies, the paper cites the suit’s claim, “are supposed to establish the connection between the bank accounts in question at the Bank of China to Gazan terror groups — Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”

Reacting to American aggravation over the matter, Netanyahu summoned outgoing Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren to Jerusalem and asked for a briefing on the issue. Oren planned to say, Yedioth writes, that Congress “sees Israel’s submission [to China] as a type of betrayal of the US,” both in the war on global terror and the conflicting interests of hegemonic powers. The Americans warned that if the Israeli officials do not testify willingly, they will be subpoenaed.

Israel Hayom leads off with a tragic story of the latest plague afflicting infants in this country: forgetful parents. A father in the West Bank settlement of Shiloh forgot his five-month-old child in the car for seven hours; the headline reads “Forgotten to death.” The man returned home from a night shift as a security guard, the paper reports, dropped off one of his daughters at kindergarten. Arriving home, he forgot the infant in the back of the car and went to sleep. Only on waking and receiving a phone call from his wife did he realize that his child was in the back of the sweltering vehicle, and on inspection found her dead.

Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom both remark that Sunday’s incident is the second in as many weeks (there has now been a third), and Yedioth comments that such tragedies “have become a phenomenon.”

Haaretz’s main headline is about the repatriation of 14 Eritrean migrants on Sunday after they willingly signed a document to be deported back to Africa. According to the paper, the migrants, who were detained in Saharonim Prison, were shipped out of the country in violation of international law.

“The practice violates the stance of the UN and human rights organizations, according to whom the consent of a person to return to his native country while he is detained in prison is illegal,” it writes. “The United Nations High Commission for Refugees clarified in the past that you cannot consider a person’s will as free if the choices before him are prolonged imprisonment and repatriation, which is likely to endanger his life.”

Maariv reports on the High Court of Justice’s non-ruling on Sunday in the petition against Ramat Gan Mayor Zvi Bar’s running for reelection (for a sixth time) because of charges against him of fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice. The issue before the court was whether such grave allegations — which have yet to be proven in court — required the mayor to step down from his position.

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, writes Israel Hayom, told the court that the decision by the Ramat Gan city council not to oust the mayor “suffered from a serious lack of reason and cannot stand,” and that “Bar is unacceptable for his post.”

According to Maariv, “the judges advised that Bar ought not contend in the upcoming [October] elections, but held back from [giving] him the disgrace of dismissal ahead of the vote.”

“Without adopting a stance on the legal question,” Supreme Court President Asher Grunis said, “we are of the opinion that from a public perspective it is unacceptable that in these circumstances a mayor would continue to serve in his position. Since the elections are about to begin, we recommend that it should be his requirement that he doesn’t submit [his name] in the coming elections.”

Haaretz’s editorial rails against the Israeli government and military for condemning B’Tselem’s documentation of the arrest of a 5-year-old Palestinian boy, but finding no need “to criticize or condemn the behavior of the soldiers, which goes against the law mandating that criminal responsibility in the military justice system in the territories begins at age 12.”

It says that the vociferous condemnation of the human rights group by the government and military is part of “the systematic campaign of delegitimization against human rights groups, a campaign whose goal is to blur and erase the ugly and violent side of the occupation.”