Nice guys finish second: 8 things to know for July 28

1. Spin cycle: The constellation of parties to the right of Likud seems just a breath away from uniting, ending weeks of speculation.

• Previewing a planned meeting Sunday between New Right heads Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett and Union of Right-Wing Parties chief Rafi Peretz, Yedioth Ahronoth says “efforts are ratcheting up a notch.”
• Also ratcheting up a notch may be the spin machine, thanks to a pliant and unquestioning media, as political rookie Peretz is learning.
• On Sunday morning, pretty much every single Hebrew-language news outlet puts out an alert that Peretz has decided to stand the two up, for the second time.
• Nobody bothers citing a source for the information, but the fact that every report in every site that carries it is accompanied by a quote from the New Right slamming the cancellation should give a bit of a clue: “They are dragging their feet and don’t want to move forward,” the New Right source is quoted saying in pretty much every news site.
• A few minutes later, Jewish Home sends out its own statement denying the report and saying the meeting is still on for 7:30 p.m. “Everything else is spin,” the party says.

2. Who cares about being first anyway? Reports over the weekend indicate that the main point of contention between New Right and the Union of Right-Wing Parties remains who will head the joint slate.

• Yedioth Ahronoth reports that the sides have decided to leave the issue of who will lead the party for last.
• It also notes that Jewish Home leader Rafi Peretz may have hinted at the way he will give up the top seat and save face, when he said he will continue to lead Jewish Home: “He’ll lead Jewish Home, while Shaked will lead the merger on the basis of a ‘technical bloc.’ Thus Peretz will both be second on the Knesset slate but still be first for the national religious party.”
• Israel Hayom quotes an “informed source” saying that Peretz has already made peace with not getting the top spot: “There’s nothing to talk about with the top spot, it’s easy, everyone wants more seats and everyone understands that Shaked can bring three or four more. Everyone understands that this is a technical bloc, so there’s really no meaning to the top spot. The argument now is over the list itself, and especially over the ninth spot.”
• What’s a technical bloc? As New Right No. 2 Naftali Bennett explained to The Times of Israel recently, “Think of it as a bus that people board with different opinions and then when it gets to a certain benchmark, they get off and go their separate ways.”

3. The wife stays out of the story: Channel 12 reports that associates of Peretz have threatened he would retire if he loses the lead spot, and several other outlets pick up the report.

• Peretz quickly issues a denial, calling the report “drivel.”
• Peretz is apparently also annoyed at Channel 12 after correspondent Amit Segal joked that after an agreement is reached it will have to go to “the real person running Jewish Home: Michal Peretz.”
• “Dear Amit, show a little respect and leave my wife out of the political game. It’s not appropriate, disrespectful and incorrect,” Peretz tweets (though not at Segal).

4. The kid stays in the country: Peretz, who hasn’t exactly played the part of a bleeding heart, is also finding himself isolated over a report that he may have a soft spot for humans, specifically the Israel-born and -raised children of migrants set to be deported.

• Ynet reports that Peretz, as education minister, sent a letter to interior minister Aryeh Deri asking him to consider allowing the children to stay.
• Well, actually, if you read the whole story, you see that the letter is from Peretz’s chief of staff Yuval Zur, but to read the Ynet report, they are basically the same person.
• Peretz takes no small amount of heat for the “expose,” including from URWP partner Bezalel Smotrich, who says he’s saving his “humanitarian feelings for our brothers who live in south Tel Aviv.”
• Shaked also rejects Peretz, saying she is “staunchly opposed” to letting children stay, and predicting that doing so will open the doors to tens of thousands of illegal migrants having families.
• The affair appears to mark the first time that Peretz (or his office) is on the same side as lefty broadsheet Haaretz, which in its lead editorial accuses Deri of using the deportations for electoral gains and calls for a consistent policy, any policy, so ministers can’t just up and deport kids when they feel like it: “The government must therefore develop a clear policy and not let ministers act according to their personal whims. As long as the state fails to do so, maintaining ambiguity, it must at least ensure minimum humanitarian conditions for the workers who are here and their children, including not deporting children raised in Israel.”

5. Joint or disjointed? On the other side of the political spectrum, the Joint List of Arab parties has agreed to join forces once again, as had been widely expected, minus one holdout: the Balad party.

• Channel 13 news reports that Balad is expected to nonetheless sign on the dotted line on Sunday.
• Haaretz reports that the party just needs the approval of its central committee, which won’t be meeting until Sunday. Balad chair Jamal Zahalka tells the newspaper his party had asked the other three to wait a day to announce the alliance, to no avail.
• Columnist Jacky Khoury writes in the paper that the re-formation of the joint list “is like a C-section, and it’s yet to be seen whether it will be successful.”

6. No love lost from Labor: Labor’s Itzik Shmuli appears to put rumors that he will leave Labor-Gesher for the Democratic Camp to bed (despite being the one to spark the rumors with threats to leave the party) Sunday.

• After Stav Shaffir, who did leave Labor to form the Democratic Camp, accuses Shmuli of being of being a liar but says she’s inviting him to join the DC anyway, Shmuli shoots back she should “drop the obsession.”
• “Throughout the whole [primary] campaign, you spread the lie that I wanted to make mergers so I could kept myself a spot in the Knesset and for nothing more … and look, who left the party during its hour of need for a cushier position?? The idea was to *come together as a party* and not get a personal buyout,” he tweets. “Goodbye and I won’t catch you later.”
• He also attaches a link to a story from June, during the party’s leadership primary, in which she accused him of being willing to sell out the party for a mid-level spot on a Knesset list.
• “So I guess this means you won’t be leaving Labor?” tweets reporter Revital Hovel sarcastically.

7. Hooray, they are only perverts! A lawyer for some of the Israelis arrested in Cyrprus over an alleged gang rape says the case has fallen apart, the accuser is being investigated and everyone will be going home free.

• Much of the Israeli press picks up the news as fact, though there is not yet any official word from Cypriot authorities. As of 11 a.m. the story had almost no play in the Cypriot press, with what little coverage there was quoting Israeli media.
• Channel 13 news reports, without citing a source, that the British tourist has now told police she had consensual sex with one of the suspects, but complained of rape after getting annoyed that it was filmed.
• “The truth has come out. The kids didn’t do anything, and actually made a big kiddush Hashem,” the channel quotes the father of one of the suspects celebrating.
• A kiddush Hashem, by the way, is a concept in Judaism where someone does something to make the whole Jewish people look good. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not sure getting accused of taking part in a gang rape — even if you didn’t actually rape the girl — falls under it.

8. When they report on us: The print has yet to cool, and there are already calls for soul searching among the press for even considering that a dozen Israeli tourists could have done such a horrible act.

• Channel 20 commentator Shimon Riklin somehow turns it into a left-right thing.
• “It doesn’t bother people to spill blood immediately, and to say it’s all because of the occupation and Bibi … when will they learn to wait? When will the left stop blaming anything terrible on right-wing Jews.”
• Riklin and others on the right, in case one forgot, were the ones who didn’t even wait a full day before calling for a Palestinian accused of a rape, who was later freed, to be executed. He himself has referred to Arabs as “rapists and killers.”
• In fact, if anything, the Israeli press has given the benefit of the doubt, and then some, to the suspects, quoting people who said the claim was anti-Semitic, or that the girl was a stripper who was trying to extort the group, or that British girls were sleeping around with everyone in the hotel.
• “There’s no objectivity in rape reporting. The Cyprus case is not extraordinary in this way, there’s just more of it,” Galit Desha, the former head of a women’s rights group, tells Globes in an article published over the weekend. “There’s an effort to describe the attackers, and not how they acted, They are more interested in the boys and less in the girl, because it’s natural to gravitate toward who is closer to you, but the story could have been told in a different way.”