Learning from the present

Wars of all types: past, present, and cyber, all make the front pages of the Hebrew dailies on Sunday, with World War II and the Holocaust uniting the papers on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Yedioth Ahronoth’s front page provides a snapshot of the fragile situation of Holocaust survivors. There are 192,000 living in Israel but, as the headline states, the number is quickly shrinking: “Every month 1,000 survivors die.” The course of time doesn’t only affect the survivors, the paper reports, but is a hindrance in prosecuting Nazi war criminals as well. Yedioth reports that Germany has recently begun a new push to find the last remaining Auschwitz guards, who would be in their 90s, and prosecute them before time runs out.

Israel Hayom also places Holocaust Remembrance Day front and center with the declaration, “Never again.” Included in its two pages of coverage is a column by Amos Regev about the missing images from the Warsaw Ghetto. Regev focuses on the Israeli flag (though he calls it a “Jewish flag”) being raised in the Warsaw Ghetto during the revolt there, and laments that there was no camera present to capture the image. That snapshot would have been included in the canonical images of World War II, along with the American flag at Iwo Jima or the Soviet Flag over the Reichstag. He concludes his piece looking forward to next week’s Independence Day celebrations. “Everyone will wave here, on Independence Day next week, the blue and white flag, — yes, the Zionist flag.”

Haaretz uses its front page to focus on two other wars: the Korean War and the impending cyberwar against Israel. Haaretz prints a translated Reuters article about the recent moves by North Korea, including the North’s warning of diplomatic missions that it could no longer guarantee their safety.

As for the cyber war that was set to begin on Saturday night, Haaretz reports that while some sites were attacked, the damage was only temporary. Hackers listed the names of Israeli government sites they hit, but according to the paper, “The sites appeared in service shortly after being attacked.”

Maariv also includes an article on the cyberattack against Israel, writing that most of the hackers were from Muslim countries and it wasn’t clear if Internet spin had convinced Western hackers to join the attack. After listing possible targets and potential damage that could be done by the attack, the paper tries to reassure readers in the last line of the article, “By the way, over the weekend, Israeli hackers mobilized a retaliation using the same methods the group is using and damaged the websites of initiators of the attack.”

Mapping out the peace process

The recent news that the United States wants Turkey to take an active role in the peace process is not sitting well with Israel. As Yedioth reports, sources in the Israeli government are skeptical about Turkey being a key member in the peace process. As a source told the paper, “Erdogan can definitely put pressure on Hamas to be flexible and accept the Quartet’s conditions, but with all due respect, we have had a bitter experience with him when mediating with the Syrians. Erdogan is not a neutral mediator.”

So Israel may not be pleased with Turkey being a major player in the peace process, but as Haaretz reports, government ministers may not be pleased with a two-state solution anyways. “Bennett: Lapid isn’t enthusiastic about the two-state solution,” reads the front page headline and the paper reports that Bennett made the statements in a meeting with the Norwegian minister of foreign affairs, Espen Barth Eide. Bennett told the diplomat that he and other cabinet ministers, including Lapid, aren’t are not strongly in favor of a two-state solution. The meeting between Eide and Bennett occurred after Eide met with Netanyahu, who told the Norwegian that he is committed to a two state solution.

Maybe the confusion in the government is not just limited to discussion with Norwegian diplomats but also with the Americans. As Maariv reports, the government is refusing to provide a map showing the position of the government regarding territorial compromise with the Palestinians to American Secretary of State, John Kerry. Sources close to the prime minister told the paper that providing a map would hurt Israel’s position in the negotiations as the two sides are still very far apart.

Lessons from North Korea

In the opinion pages, Boaz Bismuth from Israel Hayom writes, “Iran is looking at Pyongyang and smiling.” Bismuth notes that having a nuclear weapon has not brought peace to the Korean peninsula and just the opposite, the presence of weapons is heightening the tension. He assigns blame for the situation to China, which hasn’t done enough to rein in their ally. Referring to the recently failed talks with Iran, he writes, “Nuclear talks held in Kazakhstan only promoted the Iranian situation to where North Korea is today. A disturbed regime with nuclear weapons. This time the world cannot say we did not know.”

Finally, Israeli journalist and Maariv editor Amnon Dankner died on Friday at the age of 67. All the papers eulogizes the journalist, author, and actor, but it is Maariv’s Mordechai Haimovitz who pays tribute to his former editor. Aside from discussing Dankner’s achievements, Haimovitz recounts what Dankner taught him about writing. “He was the most significant editor I’ve ever had…Here you should give the word, there should extend sentence, and here you can remove the paragraph and do no harm to the music of the text. The music of the text.This idea I got from him.”