It’s 3 p.m., do you know where your poor, uneducated teens are?
The death of a 15-year-old working on the border fence raises tough questions, like why a kid was out there and what it means for Israeli society
Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor
Just a few days ago, the Haaretz daily reported that the number of female IDF recruits going into combat had doubled recently, with many of them being sent to protect the border to allow more serious fighting units to concentrate on more important matters.
The author of the article, Amos Harel, finished by asking whether Israel’s borders, especially with Egypt, are so secure that the job of protecting them can just be sloughed off on supposedly less fighty fighters by the Defense Ministry.
An answer to that question came in the most unfortunate way Tuesday with the slaying of 15-year-old Nimer Bassem Abu Amar as he was doing maintenance work on the high-tech border fence put up by Israel. The death is covered extensively by all three major dailies, though it seems to spark more questions than answers, like why a 15-year-old was at work, what that means for Israeli society, and why he was shot at.
The answer to that last question, according to official sources in Egypt and Israel, was that he was mistaken by an Egyptian police officer for a smuggler, but site manager Noor Nimr is quoted in Israel Hayom indicating it was a bit more complicated than that.
“He was making coffee for the workers and at one point he entered the border crossing point,” he’s quoted telling the tabloid. “There have been cases in the past where workers on the Israeli side crossed the border, to carry out work. In this case, Egyptian soldiers who were there started shouting in Arabic at the workers that they should leave Egyptian territory. The workers didn’t argue and started to leave to cross back to the Israeli side, but then one of the policemen shot several bursts of gunfire.”
How he was shot is not the central question, though, according to Yedioth Ahronoth, which writes that what a 15-year-old was doing working on the border in the first place needs to be answered.
“In an initial message, the Defense Ministry claimed that he worked for a subcontractor who himself had subcontracted the work out. Later, it claimed that he wasn’t an actual worker at all, but rather came along with a relative who worked as a subcontractor,” the paper writes. “Even if true, it raises the question of what kind of oversight the Defense Ministry has over border workers. How is it possible for a kid to come work there? What about inspection standards? These questions become even sharper given the fact that this isn’t the first time a relative of a contractor was hurt.”
Taking a more macro view, Haaretz columnist Or Kashti asks what the incident says about how Israel deals with child labor, especially among its poorer citizens, where high school dropout rates are high.
“Those who drop out of school generally begin working, usually in a less than organized fashion. Sometimes a job is secured through a relative. But the basic truth is that no child, even one born in Lakiya or another Arab locale, should be working on the border fence, even if a relative brought him there to ‘help’ in one way or another. The responsibility falls upon the state entity that commissions the work,” he writes. “In this case, it was the Defense Ministry, but the ministry is not alone. In some Jewish collective moshav and kibbutz communities, young Bedouin can be seen, particularly when there is a lot of work, performing various farming jobs. The moshavim and kibbutzim, like the Defense Ministry, wash their hands of responsibility on the contention that these young people are not directly employed by them. The pretense of innocence has many faces, but this is surely among the most disgusting of them.”
The Israelis
While the death gets extensive coverage, it’s not the lead story in any of the three dailies (which some might see as another symptom of the poor standing minorities suffer in Israeli society). Rather, the three papers focus their front pages on a catholic array of stories, including Yedioth’s sexy expose on papers revealing the names of Israelis who worked for the Soviet KGB in secret.
While the story is just a preview of the full expose, which will come out over the weekend, it teases with enough juicy details to make a Stan Beeman out of any reader, including the fact that the list includes three Knesset members, a number of senior army officials, engineers who worked on super-sensitive defense projects like the Lavi fighter jet and Merkava tank, and intelligence officers.
The paper reports that the names come from the Metrokhin archive smuggled out by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin in 1991. The archive was also the source of a recent expose outing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as a KGB agent by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, though the two researchers are unnamed in the Yedioth account.
One who is named is Elazar Granot, a former head of Labor forerunner Mapam and Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee member, whom the paper reports was turned by Soviet agents, though well before he served in the Knesset in the 1980s.
“According to the papers, Granot was recruited before the Six Day War by a senior KGB agent named Yuri Kotov, and contact with him was cut off with the evacuation of the Soviet Embassy in 1967,” the paper reports. “Dan Granot, the son of the MK, said in response that as a child he was witness to nighttime meetings with Kotov, who came in a car with diplomatic plates, ‘and brought good vodka and great Hungarian sausages.’ As well, Granot said that ‘my father didn’t have access to sensitive information, not that he would have wanted it, so there was no possibility for him to be a spy.’”
No less sexy, and not a little bit more current, Haaretz plays up a story from globe-trotting correspondent Anshel Pfeffer, dispatched to report from Iraq on the battle for Mosul. Reporting from near the town of Bashiqa, recently surrounded by Kurdish forces seeking to retake it from IS, Pfeffer reports that despite the hype, the battle for Mosul hasn’t really begun, but is rather “a series of simultaneous skirmishes by relatively small units, at a distance from the city itself.”
These battles, he reports, are being fought by both Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Iraqi regulars, and far from being unified, he writes, there is deep unhappiness on the Kurdish side about the relative paucity of support from the anti-IS coalition, which has lavished advanced weaponry on Baghdad but not on them.
“The sophistication of the American Apache helicopter gunships hovering high over the frontlines – sighting targets kilometers away with advanced sensors and firing Hellfire guided missiles – belies the antiquated nature of the peshmerga’s armaments. The Iraqi army may be armed by the United States, but the Kurds are reliant on Soviet-era weapons and hand-me-downs,” he writes. “In addition to their old Kalashnikov rifles, the main firepower of the Kurds is provided by ancient Dushka machine guns mounted on Japanese pickups, small cannons dragged into position by civilian trucks and one Grad missile launcher. New American-supplied TOW anti-tank missiles and Barret heavy sniper rifles are among the few weapons to have trickled down from the Iraqi Army.”
Israel Hayom’s lead story is about a decidedly less bloody battle, though one as old as time: a fight over who should get the privilege of teaching the country’s youngsters.
In what it calls an exclusive, the paper reports that the Education Ministry is pushing through new rules that will force teacher candidates to pass a ministry-administered knowledge test and personal interview, as opposed to the current system, which just requires they be certified by an institution that grants a teaching license.
Not surprisingly, the plan has its detractors, who make like the kids they instruct and complain that those in charge should quit it with all the tests already.
“It’s important to understand that the path from learning to teaching is already long and complicated,” Prof. Tamar Ariav, the head of Beit Berl Teaching College, tells the paper. “It doesn’t seem reasonable to me that after they have already shown expertise and passed the licensing requirements of the Education Ministry, they will demand that they take another test.”
