Married to the mob

To say it’s been a bad year for Israel’s police force would be an understatement. Starting with the botched case against suspects in the Bar Noar gay club shooting and ending with massive protests against police brutality and racism, with more than a smattering of scandals that besmirched the force’s brass in between, including a goodly number of sexual harassment allegations, it’s safe to say the men in blue have been feeling pretty black and blue.

So it likely comes as something of a relief for them to see Tuesday’s papers replete with reports on a major underworld crime bust. The raid, which netted dozens of gangland suspects from one crime family, including the head, according to the reports, is characterized in Yedioth Ahronoth as an “earthquake” for the country’s underworld, and is viewed in the press through the lens of the turbulent times the police have been through.

Though many details of the case remained under gag order at the time the papers were printed, a senior police source tells Yedioth Ahronoth that the public will soon see how great the multi-year probe into the crime family was, hinting that the fuzz will thus be vindicated.

“Once we are able to publicize all the details, the public will be proud of the police. This case is supposed to be a game changer in the never-ending battle against crime organizations,” the source is quoted saying.

The paper includes a rundown of many the unsolved car bombings that have plagued parts of Israel for years past, including the one police now say (after the papers were printed) is at the heart of the case, a 2003 car bombing in Tel Aviv that aimed for Zeev Rosenstein but ended up killing three bystanders instead, and which is widely thought to be the work of Yitzhak Abergil and his family of ne’er-do-wells.

Israel Hayom quotes “sources” in the police department saying “the organization as it was is not similar to what it is now,” lauding the major blow the cops say they dealt.

Commentator Iztik Saban writes in the paper that the case is a gift for police comish Yohanan Danino, who has seen the police being unfairly – at least according to Saban — pilloried in the press again and again.

“Anyone who knows this police force knows that like any other organization, it also has weeds, large and small, but there are also many others who don’t let up for a moment: tracking and watching and listening and chasing, and all this to collect evidence on crimes and to put as many criminals — who follow no law and no judge – as possible in prison.”

In Haaretz, Yaniv Kubovich throws some cold water on all the police back-slapping, reporting that even the cops know that when they take down a crime family, it’s either quickly replaced by another family that steps in to fill the vacuum or it spawns several new crime rings out of the ashes of the busted organization.

“The Israeli organizations fight among themselves in a number of main areas, including gray market loans, gambling on sports, importing and selling drugs, protection rackets on businesses, brothels and recycling bottles. According to the conservative estimates of professional sources in Israel, the underworld businesses are worth about NIS 20 billion a year. Some even claim it goes up to NIS 30 billion a year, if you include the latest big hit among them, cybercrime. One way or another, there will always be somebody who wants to get a piece of that cake, and the price – cars exploding on the streets and assassinations in city centers — will continue to be paid by civilians as well.”

Deputy to the regional minister

Another seemingly never-ending battle is being waged by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to figure out exactly who is doing what in his cabinet, where the interior minister is now the one running peace efforts with the Palestinians, the immigrant absorption minister is in charge of strategic affairs, the energy minister gets to deal with Iran and the deputy foreign minister (since Netanyahu himself is the minister) has the belly scratching portfolio.

Haaretz makes hay out of the fact that Silvan Shalom, who will manage peace talks, is on record as being against a two-state solution. Most of the quotes it pulls out of the archives on Shalom date from the last five years, in which he represented the Likud party’s position as being against settlement freezes and regarding Netanyahu reaching a deal with Ramallah as “unrealistic.”

“We are all against a Palestinian state, there is no question about it,” the paper quotes him telling a Likud meeting in 2012.

Tzipi Hotovely, the Dwight Schrute-like deputy foreign minister, does her best to play dumb and pretend she still has all the power in the world, telling Yedioth that Netanyahu promised not to put any foreign minister above her and to leave her in charge of the office, even if she doesn’t have a prestigious title.

“The prime minister handed over the Foreign Ministry to me as a deputy minister and not a minister, with all the responsibilities. Nobody has told me anything different, and I will work to my full extent to fill the role faithfully in any arena the State of Israel needs to act in,” she’s quoted saying.

Haaretz also reports that the entrance of ultra-Orthodox parties into the government is expected to bear its first fruits Tuesday with the cancellation of an initiative to give only families with both parents working subsidized daycare for their kids, something that had the dastardly effect of getting Haredi men into the – gasp! – workforce.

The paper reports that 2014 saw a 70 percent rise in the number of Haredi fathers with kids in daycare working once the rule went into effect, but that number is expected to fall once again as it the initiative is rolled back and ultra-Orthodox families go back to getting subsidized daycare regardless of who works.

The hot hot heat sweeping the land and a rash of forest fires that broke out Monday get front page treatment in Israel Hayom, which reports that “where there’s a heat wave, there’s fire.” The tabloid notes that dozens of fires raged across the country Monday, with firefighters struggling to keep up with the blazes. In the leafy Jerusalem neighborhood of Talbieh, flames from a brush fire even came close to licking a few houses, but firefighters managed to turn it back.

In the south, a farmer on Moshav Raanan got his tomatoes roasted thanks to a fire that burned some thousand dunams of farmland, including his too-hothouse. “There’s large damage to agriculture, but luckily the fire didn’t reach the homes,” he tells the paper.

The tabloid adds that temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius (113° F) in some places, and that Monday’s scorcher was just a taste of what the summer will bring. The report is accompanied by an obligatory picture of bikini-clad girls lying out on Tel Aviv’s beach. Suddenly 40 degrees doesn’t seem so bad after all.