Investigation? Ain’t no prime minister got time for that

By now it’s become a truism that 2016 was one stinker of a year for most, and from the looks of the first newspapers of the new year from the Israeli press, not much will change in 2017. While front pages are emblazoned with pictures of fireworks and wishes for a great 2017, the news offerings give a picture of a more melancholy and bizarro state of play – and that’s without the deadly Istanbul attack, which unfolded too late to make the morning papers.

Chief among the items giving a view of a new year that’s much like the old are papers tackling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent avoidance of dealing with legal challenges he is facing, with one paper – Israel Hayom, natch — joining in on the eschewal effort.

Both Yedioth and Haaretz lead off with reports that Netanyahu has failed to find the time to meet with police to answer questions about the various suspicions against him, after Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit informed him that he was under investigation on December 12.

The papers mention that Netanyahu begged off, saying he would meet with investigators after his trip to Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan that week, but hasn’t found the time since. Unmentioned is the stuff Netanyahu has found the time for, like making a silly New year’s video, reportedly declaring war on New Zealand, and spending three hours with reporters and editors from The Times of Israel, among other things.

“The main challenge now for investigators is to find a significant window of time in the prime minister’s schedule for an initial probe, which will include confronting him with allegations of receiving benefits. The police don’t want the investigation to be spread out over several days, and it’s important that they get Netanyahu’s side as succinctly as possible. For this they are planning on the possibility of questioning him during abnormal hours and taking into account that it will take place on Netanyahu’s home court – at the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem and not in the interrogation room. Police are hoping it will happen this week,” Yedioth reports, adding that police also want to keep Netanyahu from speaking to his son Yair, who will also be questioned, but can’t because, well, he’s the prime minister.

Mandelblit has refused to announce the specifics of the suspicions against Netanyahu and Haaretz reports that police are refusing to confirm reports that businessman Ron Lauder was one of some 50 people who have testified in the case.

But the broadsheet writes that Lauder testified he gave Netanyahu a suit and his son a place to stay abroad.

“According to Lauder, the gifts were between friends, part of the years-long ties he’s had with Netanyahu. However, police think that the value of the gifts is more than Lauder claimed, and that they were given as ‘casting thy bread,’” the paper reports, using a biblical term that’s used to denote payola in modern Hebrew.

Things might look bad for Netanyahu and his legal woes, but savvy readers of Israel Hayom know that journalists reporting on a police investigation into the elected head of government for the State of Israel are all just part of a pathetic “obsessive” campaign against the prime minister. So says the front page of the tabloid, quoting no less a personage than American lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who has also defended O.J. Simpson, Steve Bannon and Claus Von Bulow.

The paper quotes Dershowitz going on attack against the media, and though the paper declines to report on Netanyahu not having time to talk to the police and casts as much doubt as possible in what little reporting it does have on the legal case, the Harvard lawyer defends Netanyahu as someone who is so busy “he needs to work 25 hours a day, 8 days a week.”

As a cherry on top, Dershowitz says the police and Mandelblit should back off Netanyahu altogether, at least for now.

“I’m confident that if there is a need for an investigation, it should be done only after an elected official, a president or prime minister for instance, finishes his term. The fact that now the prime minister may have to deal with being questioned under caution on what seem to be trivial matters, investigations created by the media – harms democracy, and disturbs senior elected officials’ ability to fulfill their roles,” Dershowitz is quoted saying (in a translation of Israel Hayom’s Hebrew translation back into English.)

Israel Hayom also breaks ranks by being the only paper to look back wistfully at 2016 and view the coming of 2017 with something less than trepidation. Under a headline of “new start” and with a picture of several liberal world leaders forced out or on the way out – Matteo Renzi, David Cameron, Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel and Barack Obama – the paper’s Boaz Bismuth looks forward to a world ruled by the nativists and populists ushered in over the last 12 months – first and foremost US President-elect Donald Trump.

“2017 will be the year that populism continues to raise its head against the center that took the place of the left,” he writes. “It will also be the year that, 150 years after the publication of Karl Marx’s ‘Das Kapital,’ many will continue to dream of revolution. But 2016 [Trump and Brexit] proved that the voting booth can be much more stable than the street.”

Bismuth doesn’t raise many hackles about Trump’s friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a sign that Netanyahu doesn’t either, but in Haaretz Chemi Shalev writes that the prime minister would be smart to view TrumPutin with a more wary eye.

“If Putin is indeed calling the shots, he might very well have enough ambition to try and impose a Pax-Russiana on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Trump’s role to deliver Israel. And lest Netanyahu find comfort in the deep support that Israel currently enjoys among Republicans, he should have a look at the latest polls conducted this month among Trump voters. They were once diehard anti-Russian hawks and are now enamored with Putin no less than their president,” he writes.

While Shalev’s evenhanded approach leaves him only looking at the possibility of disastrous times ahead, Yedioth’s Smadar Peri predicts with a certainty only afforded Israeli prognosticators that 2017 will be even worse than 2016 was, especially in the Middle East, where chaos reigns supreme. If that’s still too cheery, she ends on an even more macabre note, taking stock of the other prophets of doom around the region.

“It’s interesting to note another assessment, made by all the experts: At least one leader in our neighborhood will be killed in 2017,” she writes. “Who will it be? Every expert has his guesses, every analyst has his scenarios.”