Israel Prize controversy grows

What began as a minor story yesterday has grown to dominate Wednesday’s newspapers. The Israel Prize issue — wherein two judges of the literature prize and one for the cinema prize were disqualified by the Prime Minister’s Office to serve on the judges panel — has snowballed into an all-out assault by artists on Bibi, who seems to have barely noticed.

The entire panel of judges for the Israel Prize in literature has quit in protest, and many artists have come out against the prime minister. Haim Gouri, one of the voices of the Palmach, told Yedioth Ahronoth, “As an Israeli I am full of shame.”

The PM’s office has only commented that one of the judges, Ariel Hirschfeld, was disqualified because he once came out in support of soldiers refusing IDF service in the West Bank, but has not offered any explanation for the other two rejections at all.

All the major outlets give the issue a front-page slot, but only time will tell if this is a major breaking point in the Israel Prize or just a tempest in a teapot, one new addition to the many scandals the yearly prize has accrued over its 62 years.

Haaretz gives readers a handy rundown of those events, from Ben-Gurion refusing the prize in 1968 to Yitzhak Rabin threatening to boycott the ceremony if Yeshayahu Leibowitz was presented with the award in 1993.

Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth both present the issue with dueling opinion pieces. Israel Hayom’s Dan Margalit accuses the prime minister of changing the rules on the fly. If a rule existed that you can’t make someone a judge who undermines the IDF or encourages illegal activity, that would be one thing, Margalit writes, but “you can’t rule out awarding a prize to an artistically worthy work just because its owner supports refusing to serve.”

Margalit’s counterpart Dror Eydar accuses Hirschfeld (but no word on the other rejected judges) of having done the very same thing that is being done to him. In 2006, Eydar writes, Hirschfeld was the artistic director of the International Poetry Festival that was held in Jerusalem that year and refused to invite a right-wing poet to the festival explicitly for her political leanings. So how, Eydar asks, can Hirschfeld be offended by the same mechanism he once employed being used against him?

MK Hanin Zoabi will likely be able to run in the upcoming election. Haaretz features a front-page story on the issue, with an affidavit Zoabi presented to the election committee and to Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein. “I have never called for support of an armed struggle. I have never supported an armed struggle. I have never written an article supporting an armed struggle, and I have never given a speech supporting such a struggle,” Zoabi wrote.

Israel Hayom also carries the Zoabi story on its front page.

Yedioth Ahronoth breaks rank with the other major newspapers, carrying as its lead story something that Haaretz and Israel Hayom barely covered. Israel Chemicals, Ltd. announced it will lay off dozens of workers from its plants located around the Negev. Yedioth features four of the newly unemployed in a two-page spread, lamenting the uncertainty of their current situation and their struggle to find work at an advanced age.

Sarcasm, Zionism and French anti-Semitism

Ariella Ringel Hoffman writes what might be the most sarcastic editorial of all time in Yedioth Ahronoth Wednesday, criticizing Avigdor Liberman’s fight with current Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon over the position in a future cabinet. “You can’t not admire Avigdor Liberman’s amazing abilities,” she begins her editorial. “He’s an amazing diagnostician and an exceptional prognosticator.”

“And the Americans?” she goes on, actually removing the moisture from your mouth with her dry wit. “Liberman is known as a favorite guest in the halls of the White House, and of course in the rooms of the Pentagon.”

Haaretz’s Rami Livni encourages the Zionist Union campaign to go after Netanyahu where it hurts: the Zionism.

It was a good first step for Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog to call their party “The Zionist Union,” but now they need to move that issue to the front and center, the Haaretz writer suggests.

“If that is the decision, code words will not suffice. Now is the time to cast real content, to deepen and renew the liberal-Zionist charge — and bring it along to the political fight,” Rami Livni writes.

Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency, explains his befuddlement at recent criticism against him in an Israel Hayom opinion piece. “On the left-wing of Zionism,” Sharansky writes, “they called me thoughtless for inviting Jews to abandon France at a time when they had to display patriotism and stand by their country.”

“And on the traditional, right-wing of Zionism,” he writes, “they accused me of forgetting that my position is to advance immigration to Israel and not to strengthen the communities in the Diaspora.”

Butter, orgies and recycling

The Israel Hayom tabloid includes a story today that is sure to please the fat kid in all of us. New evidence shows butter is good for you, they report. Or at least not as bad for you as previously thought. A British Medical Journal article pokes a lot of holes in the original 1977 study on fat that started the anti-butter campaign that has been raging ever since.

Famed Israeli Mizrachi singer Eyal Golan’s father will plead guilty to exploitation of minors for the purpose of prostitution and other equally unseemly charges, both Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom report.

According to The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Israel is terrible at recycling and using renewable energy, despite being one of the leaders in developing those very same technologies. Something about the cobbler’s children having no shoes. The OECD ranked Israel near the bottom in its report on the environmental practices of member countries, Haaretz reports.

And finally, the headline of the day goes to Yedioth Ahronoth in its article on the recent developments in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case. “I only had 4 orgies a year,” the newspaper quotes Strauss-Kahn as saying, beating out Israel Hayom’s good, but decidedly less good, “Sex parties? Only 4 a year.”