Looking back at Persia and seeing Iran

The fast-approaching Jewish holiday of Purim, which, according to tradition, requires that celebrants consume enough alcohol to render them unable to distinguish the Purim story’s villain, Haman, from its hero, Mordechai, is the only day on the Jewish religious calendar that requires drunken revelry. But despite the celebrations and festivities on the horizon, very little light-hearted content can be found in the weekend editions of the major Hebrew-language papers, which instead focus on the apparent dangers, both domestic and abroad, that face the Jewish state.

Israel Hayom, for example, sounds the alarm on the potential threats posed by Iran’s recent successful test of a sea-launched ballistic missile, dubbed Hormoz 2, and warns that the Islamic Republic reportedly has plans to establish a naval base in war-torn Syria. Israel Hayom’s report comes on the backdrop of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Thursday meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which the Moscow leader urged the Israeli head of state to stop living in the past, after Netanyahu tried to tie tensions with Iran to Purim, which marks a thwarted genocide attempt of Jews in ancient Persia.

“Today there is an attempt by Persia’s heir, Iran, to destroy the state of the Jews,” Netanyahu said during the meeting. “They say this as clearly as possible and inscribe it on their ballistic missiles.”

Adopting an dismissive tone, Putin said that the events described by Netanyahu had taken place “in the fifth century BCE,” and argued that “[we] now live in a different world.” Not so curiously, the paper, considered an almost official mouth piece for Netanyahu, mostly highlights the Israeli leader’s concerns about Iran, while shifting the spotlight away from Putin’s response to the remarks.

Yedioth Aharonoth, on the other hand, leads with an investigative report on alleged negligence taking place at nurseries and kindergartens across the country. The Yedioth article explains that one of the paper’s writers applied for a job at an unnamed kindergarten and was accepted to the position without so much as a background check. The writer warns that she witnessed firsthand the “shocking behavior” of caretakers towards kids, which, according to her, consisted mostly of leaving children alone and unsupervised for extended periods of time.

In order to illustrate why such behavior might be problematic, the article includes a photo of a young child executing what seems to be an elaborate plan to climb out of a crib and escape to the freedom of the great outdoors. However, the evidence presented in the article for a widespread epidemic of child neglect is anecdotal for the most part, and the real statistics behind the matter are unclear. Yedioth nevertheless seems to have set a goal of shocking parents and filling their hearts with dread, as the weekend edition of the paper also includes a rather ineffectual guide on how to respond when a child expresses sexually abusive behavior toward a fellow classmate.

In Haaretz, military correspondent and defense analyst Amos Harel notes that Israeli officials have increasingly made attempts to blur the line between the Lebanese population and military, and the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, which fought a bitter war with the Jewish state in 2006. According to Harel, Education Minister Naftali Bennett warned that in future conflicts across the northern border, Israel would not distinguish between Lebanese and Hezbollah infrastructure, and both would essentially be considered enemy targets.

Bennett tells Haaretz that the only way to ensure an Israeli victory while fighting the terrorist group is to bomb “Lebanon back to the Middle Ages,” in order to pressure the local population into severing ties with Hezbollah. Interestingly, last month, IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot downplayed the chances for a fresh war with Hezbollah in the near future, saying it and Hamas were both uninterested in a new conflict and, in the Lebanese group’s case, demoralized as well.

Speaking at a closed-door meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Eisenkot said that despite having gained battlefield experience as a result of its military invention in Syria on behalf of the regime of Bashar Assad, Hezbollah had been left significantly weakened by the fighting in Syria. “Hezbollah’s [military] operations in Syria have brought about a morale and financial crisis within its ranks,” he said.

Haaretz’s Michal Ya’ari writes about the cultural shift bubbling beneath the surface in Saudi Arabia, where, she writes, it is becoming more and more common for millennials to attempt to bridge the gaps between the Muslim faith and Western, liberal values.

Ya’ari reports that videos of Saudi teens challenging the social norms have exploded on social media, as exemplified by a viral hit of a 17-year-old Muslim youngster professing his love for a blonde American girl of about the same age in a live chat between the two. The young Saudi teen was arrested by police for “unethical behavior,” but was released two weeks later. Ya’ari assesses that such instances will become harder and harder for the Saudi authorities to contain, as even the strict Wahhabi leadership is beginning to understand that for many in the Arab Gulf, the times they are a changin’.