Lightly roasted Netanyahu whets appetite of a hungry press

After years of stories, rumors and reports about the lavish lifestyle on the public dime by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family, the chicken dinners have finally come home to roost.

News that Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, is facing indictment for spending an exorbitant sum of public money on fancy meals dominates two of the country’s three largest dailies on Sunday morning, the first editions since Avichai Mandelblit made his intentions official on Friday morning.

Those papers are filled with righteous indignation and anger, not only against Sara Netanyahu, but also against those doing the prosecuting — for not going far enough.

Yedioth Ahronoth leads off its front page with the headline “The check has arrived” with names of fancy restaurants that Sara Netanyahu ordered from from. While knowing that she got meals from fancy shmancy and trendy spots such as Machneyuda, Cavalier and Hamotzi as well as slightly more downmarket eateries like Sushi Rechavia will make great gossip fodder for the dinner club, the monthly shekel amounts she spent on food is of more import.

The paper reports that from over the course of 2011, Sara Netanyahu spent between NIS 11,768 and NIS 24,164 (more than twice the average Israeli monthly salary) per month on the food for her and her family, adding up to hundreds of thousands from the public purse into their bellies over several years.

Speaking to the paper, one chef is affronted by the Netanyahus’ attempts to dismiss the high-end meals as foil “takeaway trays.” “What’s for sure is we don’t do takeaway trays. The food was served on the restuarants’ china. They say trays so you’ll think it’s a NIS 25 workers’ meal. I served it on beautiful china,” the chef says.

Haaretz pokes a hole in another Netanyahu line of defense, that the meals are the fault on former caretaker Menny Naftali, noting that Naftali only started working in 2011, and “according to Mandelblit, from September 2010 until 2013 Sara Netanyahu and [family money man Ezra] Saidoff ordered the meals fraudulently” by charging them to the Prime Minister’s Office.

But as much as the papers might appreciate the fact that Sara Netanyahu will face justice, pundits still have bones to pick with Mandelblit for not going far enough.

In Haaretz, Amir Oren complains that the attorney general dropped three other suspicions against Sara Netanyahu, including misusing state money for other things, like an “emergency electrician” on Yom Kippur, saying that they were explained away by “special circumstances.”

“By issuing a draft of a minor indictment, much less severe than would be justified by the evidence, the attorney general did half the job – and that’s not even his job. An investigation of suspicions that involve the prime minister’s residences but don’t implicate the prime minister don’t require the attorney general’s approval. The officials who are supposed to supervise the police in such a case should be two ranks beneath the attorney general, at the level of the district attorney’s office. It’s understandable why the state prosecutor dealt with Ezra Saidoff, the deputy director general of the Prime Minister’s Office who is also being indicted in the case. But there is no convincing reason that explains why the prime minister’s wife received personal and compassionate attention from the attorney general himself,” he writes, answering his own suspicions by offering that “somebody upstairs doesn’t want her convicted.”

In Yedioth, meanwhile, Nahum Barnea says it’s a little bit ridiculous that Benjamin Netanyahu should not be implicated, as he enjoyed those same meals.

“The decision to separate Sara Netanyahu from her husband, and to indict her without even mentioning him, is beyond astounding. It seems this is the prosecutor’s policy: Anything to do with keeping a house, the husband is free from blame. He doesn’t see, doesn’t know. The wife carries all the blame,” he writes, recalling similar cases in which top officials’ wives were charged for hiring illegal help.

With Israel Hayom as the most-read paper in the country, one might assume that the Sara Netanyahu indictment, which is at the top of the nationwide news agenda, would also interest editors there. Just kidding! Israel Hayom is still little more than a Netanyahu mouthpiece, so it’s no surprise that the paper’s front page is dominated by coverage of Hurricane Irma instead.

Sara Netanyahu’s woes do make it to the front page, but only as a rousing defense of her, and against her accusers, by columnist Chaim Shine, who repeats the claim that those seeking to bring her down are obsessing with “the remnants of some takeaway trays,” and that there is nothing to all the claims against them. The real scandal, Shine claims, is all the money wasted investigating the Netanyahus’ various scandals, only to get this “pathetic” result.

“Millions of shekels wasted, hundreds of investigators, dozens of witnesses and a quorum of prosecutors worked on a variety of cases that were developed by interested parties. Who can count how many news stories, commentaries and headlines busied Israel’s citizens with the recycling of bottles,” he writes, referring to another probe of Sara Netanyahu for taking state money from bottles being returned for recycling. “Who can count all the speculations and manipulation borne around this anonymous electrician? Who can fill all the clumps of mud thrown at the prime minister and his wife over garden furniture? A great amount of wickedness and terribleness was hurled at the prime minister’s wife over the work she did to care for her dying father.”

Alongside Shine, the paper does all it can to show how innocent Sara Netanyahu is, with a roster of all the cases she was not indicted for, basically celebrating the exact same fact others have lamented and showing just how deeply perceptions can be twisted around.

While the paper is happy to rush to the Netanyahus’ defense, for some reason it doesn’t mention an argument put forward by Netanyahu’s son Yair, that George Soros, a reptile, and a greedy globalist Jew Mason are manipulating officials to cause his father’s legal woes. Must have been an oversight.

The post and ensuing backlash doesn’t escape the pages of the other papers, though, with Yedioth not bothering with scare quotes around its description of the cartoon as “anti-Semitic” and columnist Ben Dror Yemini writing that it crossed “not a red line, but a black line.”

“The cartoon is proof that something bad, very bad is happening in the house on Balfour Street,” he writes, referring to the Prime Minister’s Residence in Jerusalem. “When an anti-Semitic cartoon is coming out of there, it’s not a problem of those living in the house. It’s a problem of the State of Israel.”

In Haaretz, Yossi Verter takes aim at Yair Netanyahu’s parents for letting their son run amuck with the anti-Semites, even though psychologist Sara and defender of the world’s Jews Benjamin should know how to deal with this sort of thing.

“Has [Benjamin Netanyahu] asked his son to take the post down? To apologize? To attribute sharing a cartoon showing the Jewish billionaire George Soros as leader of the world to a hacker who has taken over his account? Yair is 26. He and his brother are usually described by their mother as ‘children.’ She is described, among her other qualities, as a working woman, etc.; as ‘a mother who looks after her children.’ Well, if they are children, please teach them how to behave. If you have any expertise – please show it,” he writes. “‘The leader of the Jewish people,’ as Netanyahu calls himself, didn’t denounce the garbage that spewed from his son’s keyboard. Maybe he wanted to, and Sara, the ‘expert,’ wouldn’t let him. It’s commonly known that the wife and elder son control the father to a large extent. A man like him, with a developed historical consciousness and unlimited education, surely understands what the significance of such a cartoon is for Jews worldwide. But he’s keeping mum.”