It’s all about the Benjamins: 9 things to know for December 28

1. Benny and the lefts: After months of speculation, former IDF chief Benny Gantz finally unveiled his political party, with the catchy name Israel Resilience Party, setting up a battle of the Benjamins with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

• Gantz’s platform is still a mystery, but reports indicate he will campaign on trying to steal votes from Likud, and not from the center-left that he is refusing to team up with; most polls had shown his entry into the race decimating Zionist Union and denting Yesh Atid.
• Netanyahu wasted no time in sniping at Gantz, telling reporters that he “doesn’t bother with how the left splits it votes,” slyly trying to paint Gantz as a leftist (and leftist as a dirty word).

2. Gantzing in the dark: Gantz revealed his party but he still hasn’t made clear what he, or it, stands for. Whether his popularity despite that is good or bad is up for debate.

• “Everyone is afraid [of Gantz]. It’s funny how much a person who has yet to say a word, whose positions are unknown and whose standings in the polls are a fiction, has managed to threaten so many people. But you can’t argue with the polls,” Yedioth Ahronoth’s Sima Kadmon writes.
• But ToI’s David Horovitz says that him keeping things vague has served him, and it may not last:
• “We love our chiefs of staff so long as they are in uniform,” he writes. “But that universal appreciation and aura of authority can dissipate quickly when the military chiefs enter politics. With every speech a chief of staff-turned-politician delivers, every clear position he takes, he inevitably disappoints, annoys and alienates another swath of the voting public.”
• Haaretz’s Yossi Verter writes that “his ongoing silence as he bides his time deciding has elicited plenty of criticism, even scorn. But it doesn’t faze him.”
• Verter quotes Gantz telling someone on the subject: “You know what my philosophy is? I was raised in the Paratroopers. If there’s one thing I learned there, it’s that when the time comes to charge ahead you do so full-force and from short-range.”

3. Gantze macher? Maybe not: Not everyone is afraid. Others are dismissing how much of a threat he is.

• In Yedioth, Sever Plotzker notes that centrist parties led by singular personalities have never been able to do more than play spoiler: “History shows that centrist parties have no chance of building a government or being at the head of it.”
• Assuming he and Moshe Ya’alon together manage to get 18 seats, “so what?” asks Plotzker. “It’s not enough to build a government and certainly not for one of the two former IDF chiefs to be its head. It’s enough to join Netanyahu’‘s coalition, or at least sit on the opposition benches.”
• Israel Hayom columnist Dror Eidar claims it doesn’t matter anyway, since Netanyahu, Gantz, Yair Lapid, Avi Gabbay and Ehud Barak are all pretty much the same ideologically anyway, seemingly trying to make a pitch for the country to just stick with what it has.
• And in the same paper, Amnon Lord mentions that Gantz has said in the past that Netanyahu is fit to be prime minister, which he attributes to Gantz not wanting to lock himself into one bloc or the other.

4. AG slag: That paper is the same that kicked up quite a storm on Thursday with its report that Netanyahu/Likud were threatening to assail Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit.

• As the Seventh Eye media analysis site noted, some early editions of the paper attributed the threatening quotes against Mandelblit to Netanyahu, while later ones said it came from Likud sources, exposing the shocking truth that the paper’s use of “Likud sources” may sometimes be Netanyahu.
• While politicians and even leaders leak things to the press all the time off the record or attributable only to “senior officials,” if Netanyahu is using the paper as a propaganda tool, it could strengthen allegations that the paper should be regarded as campaign material and not news.
• “Netanyahu denied that the threat came from him and anyone speaking for him,” Yedioth’s Ben-Dror Yemini writes. “But the words were written out clearly, very clearly, appearing in a newspaper that serves his interests time and time again. This time it was not a political threat. This time this was an actual threat on the rule of law.”
• On Friday, Israel Hayom reporter Mati Tuchfeld reports a softened version of the same threats in his weekly political roundup, though the paper appears to make sure it comes across as more analysis than reported knowledge.

5. Strange timing: Hours after the report, both main commercial news channels reported Thursday evening that the gravestone of Mandelblit’s father had been smashed with a hammer.

• Unsurprisingly, the report was immediately viewed through the lens of the threat published in Israel Hayom, with politicians and others jumping all over it.
• Netanyahu was quick to condemn the incident, but asked about it on the plane before taking off for Brazil, he noted that the vandalism was discovered 10 days ago, and wondered about the timing of it only being reported after the “defamatory headlines” about him.

6. Jair the redeemer: Netanyahu is set to land in Brazil sometime in the early afternoon Israel time, on the first ever trip to the country by an Israeli premier, and he will meet with President-elect Jair Bolsonaro almost first thing.

• The visit is widely seen as a sign of burgeoning ties between Jerusalem and Brasilia, thanks to the election of Bolsonaro, who has promised to move the country’s embassy to Jerusalem, though he may still need some convincing.
• “Israel is expected to offer information and procurement opportunities to assist Bolsonaro’s flagship project, domestic security, and hopes that in exchange he’ll keep his promise to move the Brazilian Embassy to Jerusalem soon,” Haaretz’s Noa Landau writes.
• “Bolsonaro’s election marks a new era in Israel-Brazil relations and he fully intends to strengthen this relationship on all levels — political and economic — throughout his tenure,” Leah Soibel, the founder and CEO of Fuenta Latina, a Jerusalem-based nonprofit seeking to improve ties between Latin America and the Jewish state, tells ToI’s Raphael Ahren.
• “To illustrate just how important this trip to Brazil is, Netanyahu is still pressing ahead with it despite all of the challenges he faces at home. The fact that he didn’t cancel it speaks volumes,” she says.
• Much is made of the fact that Brazil was previously seen as pro-Palestinian, but it has also had a history of strong trade ties with Israel, which were already growing before Bolsonaro came to power.
• An article by the Brazilian Report from March, when Bolsonaro was barely a blip on anyone’s screen, seems to predict his rise, with expert Mauricio Santoro saying Brazilian evangelicals could well usher in even stronger ties.
• “This could even have an impact on Brazilian diplomacy. This group is getting stronger, and so they are seeking more control with policy,” he says. “They could end up bringing Brazil’s foreign policy closer to Israel, and further away from Arab countries.”

7. Left behind: One person who knows first-hand about Brazil’s attitude toward Israel is settler leader Dani Dayan, who was rejected as Israel’s envoy to Brasilia, and sent to New York instead to be consul general.

• But being left behind meant he got to see the Great New York alien invasion/transformer explosion firsthand.
• “What’s happening now in the skies of New York is one of the strangest/most beautiful/scariest/amusing things I’ve ever seen,” he tweets. “This is exactly how it looks in movies where there is a nuclear explosion or alien landing. Even for the rational ones among us it crossed their minds, even if we knew there was a different explanation.”

8. Boffo or boot: If any of those alien or nuclear movies happen to contain criticism of Israel, they can forget about getting state subsidies to film there.

• Israel Hayom reports new rules signed off on by Economy Minister Eli Cohen mean that foreign films looking to shoot in Israel will not be able to apply for state funds if the producers or the film are deemed to be anti-Israel.
• According to the paper, the rule is pretty much the same as the one pushed by Culture Minister Miri Regev, though it has a narrower application. But the paper notes that it will affect a program Cohen’s ministry had just launched to bring in foreign film crews by promising them state subsidies.
• As for what may be deemed anti-Israel, it seems the ministry has pretty wide leeway in deciding, with the rule determining that the funds be conditioned on “the movie not having any content that disqualifies Israel’s creation as a jewish and democratic state, and incites to racism, violence or terror.”

9. The real media review: Lastly, what’s the end of the year without an end of year roundup?

• Just in time for the weekend, 14 Times of Israel’s writers give readers a behind the scenes look at their favorite or most significant stories of the year, from LGBTQ youth in the settlements, to sexual harassment allegations against a top aide to Netanyahu, to a law that almost gave police cart blanche access to everyone’s online data.