Lame scandals and lamer ducks

The inability of most people to truly step outside themselves and their points of view to see a wider picture leads to situations like that found in Israel’s print press Monday morning, where stories that matter very little to those outside the newspaper or its core readership are given extra prominence, thanks to that very human bias.

In Haaretz, the lead story reports on a state committee recommending the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality swallow southern neighbor Bat Yam, a move unlikely to interest anyone outside the Gush Dan conurbation or your occasional urban planner (guilty as charged).

But the broadsheet’s sins of provincialism pale in comparison to those of its tabloid rivals, who engage in a game of creating conspiracies out of nearly whole cloth to try and put each other or each other’s patrons down.

Thus you have a lead story in Yedioth Ahronoth claiming to blow open a scandal by which Israel – at the behest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — is buying ships from a company which has them built by an Abu-Dhabi-based company, complete with all the trumped-up skulduggery of a John le Carre novel, ignoring the fact that the story is not new and not really a scandal.

A paper could be forgiven for publishing an old story if it didn’t know about it, but in this case, Yedioth’s expose on French-Lebanese shipbuilder Iskander Safa is essentially a reprint of a story about French diplomat (and pseudonymed Yedioth journalist) Roger Auque run by the paper a year ago, down to an identical lead sentence.

The new story has the gloss of shedding new light on the activities of Safa, but much of the information was previously reported by Auque or by Yedioth in its story about him, complete with his codename Sandy, which Yedioth has blasted as its headline.

Why report on Safa? Because he is the man managing a firm building ships for Israel’s navy, and according to the report, he was contacted by Israel, through Auque, in its search for missing airman Ron Arad decades ago, which the paper makes out to be the latest in a series of “scandals” predicated on the idea that no company with ties to states Israel is at war with should be allowed near equipment built for its military.

In a bit of new reporting, the paper does ask Israeli diplomat Uri Lubrani to confirm that he met Safa in the search for Arad, which he does, kind of.

“I met with a lot of Lebanese figures to collect information about the fate of Ron Arad, and I remember one of them had the name Safa,” he’s quoted telling the paper.

The shipbuilding story may have jumped the shark, but it started with a very serious and real scandal exposed by Channel 10’s Raviv Drucker, who reported weeks ago on ties between David Shimron, personal lawyer to Netanyahu, and the company building new submarines for Israel’s navy.

Since then Netanyahu has tried to paint Drucker as a political operative attempting to take the prime minister down, and Monday’s Israel Hayom joins in as never before. The paper’s lead story, quoting Netanyahu, places Drucker in a triangle of biased media lies with Channel 10 and Yedioth publisher Arnon Mozes, creating a conspiracy that would be considered anti-Semitic were it published anywhere else.

The reason for the attack: a claim that Drucker tried to send someone to record Brig. Gen. Ofer Winter saying that he ordered the killing of a Palestinian child for no reason even though it never happened, in order to keep Winter from getting promoted.

The article quotes heavily from Netanyahu’s response, which mostly places Channel 10 in its targets and includes the Trumpesque passage that “this is a channel with a radical leftist slant on everything and thus it’s no wonder that its rating are so low.” All that’s missing is the “Sad!”
While also relying on Facebook posts and interviews with others to collect responses from Channel 10 and Drucker, the paper does interview the man who made the claims against Drucker, Winter’s buddy Oded Saburai. Saburai tells the paper he decided to come forward and tell Winter’s tale when he heard that Drucker was set to publish a story about Winter and a commander below him who was convicted for sexually harassing a soldier.

“There’s nothing in the investigative report,” he’s quoted saying. “The report targets Ofer Winter because he is religious and is seen as someone with rightist interests, which don’t fit Drucker’s agenda.”

The Ofer Winter story is seen by Haaretz’s Amos Harel as a “grenade” thrown into the larger entanglement between the army, religion and state, one which has been wrapped up in disputes over beards on soldiers, the place of women in the military and even how to deal with the Amona outpost, which is slated to be razed later this month, to the chagrin of some religious settlers who see the rule of law as subservient to God’s biblical promises.

Unraveling one spaghetti strand to show how deep the never-ending pasta bowl goes, Harel reports that since the Likud and Jewish Home parties are beholden to the settler public, they cannot be seen as making the evacuation job any easier for the army and police.

“The IDF understands that at this point there’s no chance of getting permission to take preventative steps before the planned evacuation at the end of the month,” Harel writes. “Such steps could include blocking demonstrators’ access to the outpost or issuing restraining orders against extremists who the Shin Bet security service believes might use violence to disrupt the evacuation. Dozens of young people are already staying at the settlement as reinforcements.”

As for a deal reportedly reached between Netanyahu and Jewish Home head Naftali Bennett to move Amona to a nearby plot and stave off violence, reported on by all three papers, Israel Hayom quotes a response from the outpost residents who apparently think the Israeli public is behind them in opposing anything but totally disobeying the court order to evacuate the hilltop.

“The public aren’t idiots. They won’t be taken in by diktats from the extremist left, to slay a flourishing settlement, to kick out 200 children from their homes and to call it a ‘package of benefits for settlements,’” they are quoted saying. “True leadership is tested in true moments. For hundreds of thousands of believers in the Land of Israel, Amona is a litmus test and a symbol of the struggle. Whoever gives up on Amona in the end will give up on Ofra, Netiv Ha’Avot and the future of settlements as a whole.”

For many in Israel and outside of it, that’s not a threat but a dream. One of those people is US Secretary of State John Kerry, who expressed frustration, yet again, over the lack of movement toward a two-state solution Sunday, blaming settlements and earning some headlines but even more analysis.

In Haaretz, Barak Ravid writes that after four years, Kerry finally let loose with what he really thinks, that Israel’s leadership isn’t really interested in a two-state solution and is being steered by Bennett against the country’s interests. More than that, he writes that Kerry seemed to leave room open for a last-ditch UN Security Council resolution on Israel before Trump takes office, long thought off the table.

“Kerry clarified that rumors of US President Barack Obama leaving the White House with no further dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue are premature. He said a decision has not yet been reached,” he writes. “Kerry was precise in his comments. Such a decision is likely to be made in the coming week.”

But with less than two months to go before inauguration day, Yedioth’s Nahum Barnea sees Kerry’s screed as little more than the ravings of a lame duck who can’t come to terms with the reality of his lameness, repeating the same words as last year, but this time with no power or time to back them up with action.

“Last year it was heartbreaking. This year it was pathetic,” he writes. “In general, Obama administration graduates are in the second or third stage of grief, refusing to separate from the power they wield and the policies they believe in, but knowing that soon they will have to pack up.”