Israeli press scorns Netanyahu for building a wall with Mexico
Pundits blame PM for diplomatic fallout over ‘stupid’ tweet, while police reportedly have damning evidence in case against Netanyahu
Ilan Ben Zion is an AFP reporter and a former news editor at The Times of Israel.
The growing diplomatic crisis between Israel and Mexico over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tweet of support for US President Donald Trump’s border wall along the Rio Grande is a cause for Hebrew media condemnation.
The crisis with Mexico, “a state that’s considered one of Israel’s clear friends in the world, is only deepening after Netanyahu’s tweet about border walls, Yedioth Ahronoth reports. It calls the incident “a crack in the wall,” alluding to both Trump’s Mexican border wall and Netanyahu’s efforts to garner greater diplomatic support in the international area.
Israel Hayom also publishes Netanyahu’s rebuttal to Mexico’s indignation over his tweet suggesting Trump is right to build a wall on the border with Mexico. Mexico demanded an apology, while Netanyahu clarified that he didn’t explicitly refer to the Mexican border wall, and that he was only talking about the one Israel built on the border with Egypt. At the same time, Netanyahu blames the “Bolshevik media” for creating the diplomatic crisis.
Haaretz’s editorial upbraids Netanyahu for his “unnecessary and damaging tweet” in support of Trump, writing that it’s “hard to understand what went through Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s head when last week he praised on Twitter US President Donald trump’s intention to build a wall against illegal immigrants on the US’s border with Mexico.”
“Perhaps Netanyahu thought Trump would owe him one. Perhaps [Israeli] Ambassador [to the United States] Ron Dermer, who’s no less close today to the White House than he is to the Prime Minister’s Office, urged him to,” the paper suggests.
“One way or the other, the tweet was stupid and damaging. Netanyahu put himself in the middle of an internal political conflict in the United States and positioned himself on Trump’s side against Mexico. With the nonsense of his tweet, the prime minister created a serious diplomatic crisis with Mexico and stirred an outbreak of anti-Semitism, which angered and scared the local Jewish community.”
Yedioth Ahronoth’s Sima Kadmon also calls the Twitter message a “post of shame,” commenting in her column that the prime minister has neither shame “nor a gram of integrity” for blaming the Israeli media for supposedly generating a diplomatic crisis that doesn’t exist.
“Thus he turned his pointless tweet not only into a crisis with a state that’s one of our allies, but into another point of incitement, hatred and delegitimization of the public that has no connection to this failure,” she says.
Trump spokesman-in-chief in Israel Boaz Bismuth is called in by Israel Hayom to assuage readers’ concerns in his op-ed, and parrots Netanyahu’s defense that the tweet was blown out of proportion. The paper runs an exuberant headline proclaiming the the upcoming meeting between Trump and Netanyahu on February 15, quoting the prime minister saying the powwow will be “essential” to national security. The headline deftly deflects public attention away from the faux pas made Saturday night by Netanyahu on Twitter that’s resulted in diplomatic fallout with Mexico.
Israel Hayom makes sure to note that Netanyahu says he plans to tell Trump to reimpose sanctions on Iran over its failed long-range missile test. Haaretz, for its part, calls Iran’s missile test “the first test for Trump” in its front page story. The paper parrots Fox News’s initial report on the ballistic missile test, saying that the “stormy spirit” projected by the new administration is understood well by the international community, and that this was Iran’s first test of the new president’s mettle.
But Netanyahu and Trump have to share the Page 2-3 spread in Israel Hayom with the “war of attrition” over a bill to legalize illegal West Bank outposts that was set for final Knesset approval on Monday, but got pushed off for a week. The opposition’s attempts to push off the vote were conducted in an “unserious atmosphere,” with the paper comparing it to “a soccer match whose outcome is known in advance, when the losing team wastes time in order to prevent a rout and win public approval for putting up a tough fight and not giving up easily.”
While Israel Hayom, as ever, casts the prime minister in a positive light, Haaretz’s main story goes after Netanyahu. It reports that police investigators have evidence of members of Netanyahu’s family asking favors of businessman Arnon Milchan. Milchan’s relationship with the prime minister is at the center of an ongoing police investigation, and according to a report on the Walla news website cited by Haaretz, the cops have emails and text messages exchanged by the two parties asking for cigars and champagne.
Vigilant as ever on matters of national health, Yedioth Ahronoth reports that the flu vaccinations distributed this winter by Israeli healthcare providers were for the wrong strain of the virus, resulting in many people getting sick despite having received the shots.
The paper quotes a medical expert saying that “there isn’t much of a difference between injecting that vaccine and injecting water. The effect is the same effect. We identified this at the beginning of the winter and reported it to the Health Ministry.”
The Health Ministry, in turn, admitted that the varieties in the vaccine are different from the ones people are coming down with, but argue that there are other metrics to determine whether the vaccine is effective or not.
