Houses of the Holy Land

A corruption scandal surrounding a former district attorney and the prime minister’s uphill battle to appoint the ministers he wants are at the top of the pig pile in the papers on Monday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “keeping his cards close to his chest” and hasn’t informed anybody in his party of which positions they’ll be appointed to as the move to expand the government from 18 to 20 ministers hits a snag, Israel Hayom reports. The paper says that with Yesh Atid’s move to scupper Netanyahu’s bid to increase the number of ministers by appealing to the Supreme Court, the new government’s ministers might only be sworn in on Thursday rather than Wednesday, or even at the start of next week.

Yedioth Ahronoth reports that Netanyahu is concerned that if he announces who he’ll appoint before the vote takes place, disgruntled Likud party members will torpedo the vote and sink the amendment, leaving Netanyahu with just 18 ministerial posts and four deputy ministerships to dole out to his coalition allies and party members.

Zionist Union members are forming a united front against the much-discussed and regularly denied possibility of the center-left party joining a Netanyahu coalition and forming a unity government, Haaretz reports. The paper says that senior party members suspect that former Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovich plans to bring about the party’s unification with a Netanyahu coalition, a move which Yachimovich denies. MKs Eitan Cabel, Merav Michaeli, Itzik Shmuli and Erel Margalit — as well as Tzipi Livni — came out publicly against joining the government, the paper reports.

In the ongoing court case against former Tel Aviv district attorney Ruth David, the police made the “dramatic” announcement that they’re investigating allegations that David tried to lure a senior lawyer at the Tel Aviv DA’s office into a private firm job while simultaneously pressuring him to resign while defending a suspect in an organized crime case. The court extended David’s detention by another day on Sunday and was likely to send her to house arrest during the trial, Israel Hayom reports.

David is suspected of obstruction of justice and bribery in her 10 years in the district attorney’s office, and the judge already banned her from practicing law for the next two months and from leaving the country for the next six, Yedioth Ahronoth reports. The paper quotes her lawyer saying, “My client denies the suspicions against her and she hopes her innocence will be proven soon.”

Haaretz also reports that Jewish Home leader and outgoing religious affairs minister Naftali Bennett last week ordered a change to the government listings according to which hundreds of congregational rabbis can request regular salaries from the state’s coffers. While the change in policy was signed last week by Bennett, just before he agreed to join Netanyahu’s government and give up his religious affairs portfolio to the Shas party, it still requires approval by ministry bureaucrats, the paper reports.

In its editorial, the paper bemoans the fact that Netanyahu gave control of the Religious Affairs Ministry to an ultra-Orthodox party as part of his coalition deal “fire sale,” saying Netanyahu “has promised Shas and United Torah Judaism to undo Israel’s reforms in conversion law and the military draft,” among other points. While secular Israelis will be largely unaffected by most of the ministry’s decisions, “the victims of the old-new political wheeling and dealing are those who seek to uphold tradition and marry and divorce under the laws of Moses and Israel. They don’t want to forgo kashrut, conversion and burial according to Jewish law.”

But the jewel in the Monday papers’ crown is its coverage of Sara Netanyahu’s court appearance on Sunday in which she blamed the media for accusations against her. Menny Naftali, a former Prime Minister’s Residence employee, wanted “to depose the prime minister with the help of a very powerful media figure,” she is quoted saying by Haaretz.

“It’s hard to be Sara Netanyahu,” reads the headline in Yedioth Ahronoth. The paper quotes her saying about the charges that she had excessive expenditures that “it’s hard to live with what they do to us, it’s hard to be Sara Netanyahu, what they’re doing to us is shedding blood.”

Mrs. Netanyahu denied the allegations against her leveled by Naftali, Israel Hayom reports, including the notorious claim that she asked him to replace a bag of milk at three in the morning. She said the reports published in the media about her demand of individually packaged boiled eggs were “fantasy.”