Just keep ’em talking

Keeping somebody talking just for the sake of talking is a strategy oft used in a variety of situations: hostage negotiations, concussion victims, talking a suicidal person off a ledge, and now after the latest extension of talks with Iran, the race toward a high-stakes nuclear agreement can be added to the list.

As the talks enter the pantheon of those other great developments, there’s little shock and alarm in the Israeli press, which eyes the extension either with a resigned dismay, as Israel Hayom does; with little surprise, as in Haaretz‘s coverage; or with so little caring that it gets less play than the prime minister taking part in a dance contest, which is Yedioth Ahronoth‘s way of tackling (or not tackling) the issue.

In Israel Hayom, the talks take center stage, with a front page headline promising to tell readers how US Secretary of State John Kerry managed to “drag” Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov back to the table, after he had seemingly said dasvedanya to the efforts. The revelation comes courtesy of Boaz Bismuth, who was awarded a fly on the wall vantage point to watch these closed negotiations.

Or so the paper the advertises. The reveal in Bismuth’s dispatch though, doesn’t quite live up to the promise made in the headline, reading more like “The Hangover” than “In The Loop.”

“It was amazing to see on Tuesday at 10 at night, Lavrov at the hotel bar in Geneva sitting next to me and drinking a few glasses with two colleagues from his team. At a table not far away on my left, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius sat with members of his team. The Iranians obviously did not come to the hotel bar. Yesterday, during the day, John Kerry came right next to the press center in the Olympic Museum, when he took a break and visited the museum,” Bismuth writes. “After about an hour Lavrov came in, wobbling a bit, and took off his tie. Kerry pulled him forward in order to keep negotiating.”

Later on, Bismuth’s skepticism shines through in noting the date that all this happened. “The nuclear negotiations in Lausanne renewed yesterday at 6 a.m. in a hallucinatory atmosphere. The date, April 1, didn’t help the untrusting atmosphere that has taken over the talks.”

Haaretz reports that it took Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif just 10 minutes to decide to extend the talks. While those two both seemed convinced as to the righteousness of their crusade, the paper’s Ari Shavit is less sanguine, writing that Tehran is pulling a fast one on the world, and joining Jerusalem hawks in comparing the negotiations to the disastrous Munich talks with Hitler in 1938.

“In recent months the six major powers have faced a paper tiger, which only nuclear teeth would turn into a real tiger,” he writes. “But the powers’ incompetence and lack of resolve once again became Iran’s trump card. Just as it succeeded in deceiving the West for a decade of strategic wrestling, it succeeded in overcoming the West in a fateful year of diplomatic wheeling and dealing. The same combination of resolve, cunning and ingenuity that enabled Khamenai’s Iran to get as far as Lausanne enabled it to maneuver in Lausanne and cast a giant shadow on world peace.”

In Yedioth’s op-ed page, Giora Eiland opines that some of the blame for the folly of the talks lies with Israel, which has managed its own diplomatic campaign against the negotiations wrongheadedly and could benefit from a good deal.

“Instead of coming to an understanding with the Americans that a tolerable deal is preferred over no deal, we decided to be right and not smart,” he pens. “We preferred PR campaigns — how good we are, how bad the Iranians are, how weak the American government is — instead of a diplomatic process to get to a consensus with the Americans on the minimum lines that we could live with.”

With Israel’s diplomatic defensive strategy against a deal falling flat, the country still has its military defensive strategy, which is one step closer to gaining another piece after a successful test of the David’s Sling mid-range missile defense system.

Yedioth writes cutesily that the system works “like magic,” a play on the Hebrew name for the system, which translates to Magic Wand, and calls the missile defense array Israel’s answer to Hezbollah and Iran.

The paper reports that the system can shoot down Fajr missiles, Scuds and M-600s, filling a gap between the short-range Iron Dome and long-range Arrow II. “Through this we can defend wide swaths throughout Israel, with no relation to the deployment of Iron Dome batteries, which will continue to defend against threats in a synchronized and integrated way,” a Rafael official who heads the project is quoted telling the paper.

While that system won’t be up and running for another year or so, there’s always the tried and true defense doctrine of blasting your enemies to smithereens from the sky before they can get to you, which is what happened to Hezbollah commander Jihad Mughniyeh in a reported Israeli strike in Syria several months ago.

Israel Hayom reports that new information confirms what was long suspected, that Mughniyeh was actively planning attacks against Israeli towns across the border when he was pulverized.

“New details on the attack in Syria show that Mughniyeh was at the head of a special unit designed to carry out attacks on the Golan heights with small arms fire, bombs, rockets and even infiltrations into Israeli towns,” the paper reports, without detailing where the info came from. “The unit was created a year ago personally by Hassan Nasrallah and senior Iranian officials, and included dozens of armed militants, including Hezbollah fighters.”