Learning the meaning of no

The bullet shot by Ephraim Bracha, head of the police’s fraud investigation unit, into his own body after being found guilty in the court of public opinion also manages to pierce the normally iron-plated press Monday, with his suicide setting off solemn handwringing from the fifth estate.

Much of the coverage focuses on Bracha’s feelings of loneliness and lack of anywhere to turn after being caught up in a bribery scandal involving the infamous Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto, with the mantra “unable to stand the mudslinging” repeated several times.

But while the details of the suicide are laid out for all to see as a top story in all three major dailies (competing only with the Greece referendum rejection for marquee space), it’s the look inward at what went wrong that personalizes much of the commentary surrounding the tragedy.

In a sign that lessons are only being half-learned, much of the blame is placed on an article published just a few days earlier by the news site News 1 headlined “Ephraim Bracha is a public danger,” and a Maariv journalist accused of overstepping his bounds, with the scads of other negative articles written about Bracha since the case broken open in 2013 mostly forgotten.

Israel Hayom’s Haim Shine normally saves his press criticism to smack down other papers – mostly Yedioth Ahronoth – for their insolent refusal to toe the government line, but on Monday, he calls for general soul-searching among the press after Bracha’s suicide.

“People invest many years before they are recognized for the work they have done. All they have is their good name and the esteem of their surroundings. And one day, with no warning, a person suddenly finds himself exposed to an attack from the press without the ability to defend himself,” he writes. “The one thing he had is taken from him in an instant and because of that he loses the will to live.”

In Haaretz, Gidi Weitz says that the journalists who helped smear Bracha were doing so as pawns of the police’s internal investigations unit and their psychological games.

“There were several journalists involved in this game; in doing so they may well have betrayed their calling as journalists, if they ever had one. One of them, Aviram Zino of Maariv, gave evidence against Bracha a few weeks ago to the Justice Ministry department for the investigation of police officers,” he writes. “Bracha’s suicide may well be another sign of the deterioration of the journalistic profession. Questionable work practices have become the hallmarks of some of them.”

Eli Sinior, in Yedioth, though, places most of the onus on the cops and their methods of trying to break suspects down.

“Once the police claimed the affair for all their glory, Bracha started to pay the price. Unending rumors started to swirl around him and his family, total fantasies and false claims flowed intentionally toward the press and the police internal investigations unit, and almost very week a new affair came out tied to his name,” he writes.

Mostly unmentioned in the papers is the fact that this is not the first time the press has had to do soul-searching following the suicide of a public official, after an Interior Ministry official took his own life following blown up reports accusing him of racism.

Can you feel the ‘no’ tonight?

One hopes the press may learn from its overzealousness to bring down public officials, though as the world learned on Monday, refusing to pay the piper the consequences of your actions is also always an option.

I’m speaking of course of Greece, which decided Sunday to flip the bird to Europe and its attempts to push a credit reform arrangement on the hard-working people of Athens.

Reporting from the birthplace of democracy, Israel Hayom’s Boaz Bismuth notes that the Greeks didn’t even wait for the final results of the referendum affirming the rejection of the debt deal to take to the streets of Athens in celebration. “No,” he writes, was in the air.

“European leaders urged ‘Yes,’ and Greek TV stations urged citizens to vote ‘Yes’ over the past week if they didn’t want their country enter a period of uncertainty and to receive the EU’s bailout package. But whoever was in Athens last night, like me, felt the ‘No’ in almost every place possible.”

In Yedioth, financial commentator Sever Plotzker notes that with the “No” firmly affirmed, the Greeks are no better off than they were last week. While noting there is no magic bullet to save Greece’s ailing economy, he does write a prescription for how it can get out of its rut.

“In order to prevent paralysis, Greece will need immediate aid to the tune of some 60 billion euros, to erase a third of its debt and to spread out the rest of its debt for 40 years, and I estimate that’s what it will get,” he writes. “And what will they give in return? They will commit to enact fiscal policies that are sound, realistic and reform-minded which will heal the sick economy and save the society from chaos; to strengthen reforms that will support growth and lower inequality.”

Greece getting away with what single borrower could never do seems a foregone conclusion, and thus it goes everywhere, even the Israeli army, writes Amir Oren in a Haaretz op-ed, waxing eloquent on the punishment handed down to brigade commander Liran Hajbi over sexual misconduct allegations.

In the eyes of the IDF, Hajbi’s biggest sin wasn’t his misdeeds, writes Oren, but the fact that he wasn’t ranked higher.

“Hajbi arrived at the proceeding against him too early in his career and with too low a status,” he says. “What is forbidden for a lieutenant colonel, a colonel and even a brigadier general is permitted for a major general. That is the rank that guarantees immunity for the senior officer class, the khaki floor that prevents a downfall.”