Netanyahu doth protest too much, many think

There’s no doubt that Israel didn’t have the best day in Europe Wednesday. Between the European Union taking Hamas off its terror list on a technicality, the EU parliament voting to recognize Palestine, and a conference in Switzerland taking Jerusalem to task — all in the course of a few hours — there didn’t seem to be a lot of love coming out of the Continent.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the staff of Israel Hayom though, the ill-timed diplomatic moves out of Brussels and Geneva weren’t just sigh-worthy, they were the newest iteration of the Holocaust, the slaughter of six million Jews just 70 years ago.

While Netanyahu scolded that “many in Europe, on whose soil six million Jews were slaughtered, have learned nothing,” the tabloid, brimming with rage at the old country, goes one step further.

The paper invokes the Shoah in several places, terming Wednesday’s decisions an “anti-Israel diplomatic blitz,” admonishing with its main headline that “they haven’t learned a thing,” and for the applesauce on the latke, analyst Dan Margalit calling it a “second Kristallnacht.”

“Not at night, but in the day, not with violence, but with words. Not with the smashing of synagogues and beatings of Jews, but with the crushing of all the words ‘never again,’” Margalit writes.

His larger point, though, is to take Netanyahu and the government in Jerusalem to task for their flaccid response to Europe’s “unjustifiable tsunami,” and in that he seems to fall in line with the rest of the papers, who have few good things to say about the prime minister.

In Yedioth Ahronoth, Shimon Shiffer calls Netanyahu’s invocation of the Holocaust in condemning Europe his “doomsday weapon,” but notes that this time the Continent was not cowed by references to the past, with one diplomat shooting back that “this is not the Shoah.”

“Our anger at the Europeans on the brink of recognizing Hamas is just. But the Europeans also expect to see real steps from the Israeli side, especially regarding its policies for Gaza,” Shiffer writes. “Netanyahu brought up the memory of the Holocaust to condemn the European decisions. But what he still doesn’t understand is that for them, what is burning is not what happened in Europe 60 years ago, but what’s happening in the territories now.”

Netanyahu could look to Haaretz for a bit of holiday cheer, where a poll shows 34 percent of the public seeing him as most fit for the candle-lighter-in-chief job — double the support for Labor’s Isaac Herzog, who garners second place with 17%. The poll also shows 53% of the public not wanting him to return for a fourth term, though, which may take the jelly out of his doughnut. (Should I stop? I should stop.)

Diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid, tying the elections in, points to the campaign as the motive behind Netanyahu’s shrill response to the Europeans.

“Netanyahu doesn’t have a solution to the serious diplomatic isolation Israel has maneuvered itself into under his leadership. His response to the accumulation of events on Wednesday was disproportionate and conveyed mainly hysteria. But his harsh statements appear to be prompted by the election campaign,” Ravid writes. “The cynical political use Netanyahu made on Wednesday of the Jews who were gassed to death in Treblinka or burned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria set a new record even for him. If this is the way he acts three months before the election, it’s frightening to think what he will do three weeks before the polls open.”

From Havana to Tehran?

In one of the stranger headline choices seen recently, Yedioth plays Washington’s about-face on Cuba as a “romance between Obama and Castro.” The freeing of Alan Gross, a Jewish American subcontractor let go as part of the historic détente, garners little more than a footnote in the Hebrew press, which seems more concerned with the wider implications of the deal for Israel’s own lobbying.

In Israel Hayom, Boaz Bismuth writes that Tehran, for instance, is following the flowering friendship between Washington and Havana with interest.

“The amazing part is that Havana didn’t need to do much to win the removal of sanctions. In Tehran, they are closely watching the American president, who told the world yesterday that he doesn’t believe in sanctions. Obama in six years in the White House did not do especially well on foreign policy. In exchange for lifting the sanctions, Havana gave him a legacy to be proud of,” he writes.

Chemi Shalev in Haaretz estimates that Obama’s use of executive privilege in changing the policy may alter the calculus in Congress on how to deal with Iranian negotiations, seeing as he could pull the same move.

“This maneuver plays into what was the subtext of Wednesday’s Cuba drama for many Israel-watchers: the administration’s claim that it does not need Congress in order to suspend sanctions against Iran, only to revoke them altogether,” he writes. “This assertion could doubly motivate Republican leaders, if they needed any encouragement, to try and exert as much control over the Iran negotiations, before the fact, if possible, and not after.”

Israeli papers also look inward Thursday, after police announced they nabbed a ring of suspected sex criminals, including a senior intelligence officer.

The story leads Yedioth Ahronoth, which reports that the unnamed spook is accused of sodomizing a 15-year-old boy. The paper writes that the involvement of such a senior officer from such a secretive military unit “hovered over the room, and gave the already troubling case more dangerous aspects.”

Expounding on what those dangers could be, the tabloid’s Yossi Yehoshua writes that he dealt with secret information, and that he should have been subject to better oversight to keep him out of trouble, since the affair could have ended much worse for everybody.

“The arrest of the suspect indicates that he was highly exposed to blackmail,” he writes, “should the incriminating information have gone not to the police but to hostile parties.”