Obsolete before they hit the stands

As much as the print publication still holds many advantages over other types of media, Sunday morning’s papers in Israel are a clinic on the limitations of the model, especially in Israel, where papers take a break each week to respect the holy Sabbath.

All four major papers go large with front-page packages about Israel’s reported strike on a missile transfer to Hezbollah (Friday night’s/Saturday morning’s news), and totally miss out on the reported Sunday 2 a.m. strike on a number of sites around Damascus. It’s like Walter Cronkite reporting that John F. Kennedy was taking off for Dallas, hours after he had been shot.

But while the papers might not be able to offer us “news” in the purest sense of the word (outdateds, maybe?), they do serve up enough analysis to let you know what every writer and his mother thinks about Israel’s latest alleged foray into the Syrian morass.

Yedioth Ahronoth toots its own horn by noting that it did in fact predict the strike, having run a Lebanese report that Israel was getting ready to strike. The paper’s Alex Fishman reads the tea leaves himself and predicts (correctly, it seems!) that these mysterious strikes on Syrian weapons transfers will continue and get more frequent. “As the Syrian regime continues to crumble, the pace of the transfers will ramp up — as well as the pace of the strikes. Hezbollah is doing everything it can to get as much fighting material out of Syria to Lebanon. Now more than ever the group is taking the risk that the transfers will be found out and hit, since the alternative is to lose the equipment in Syria.”

Israel Hayom gets cutesy with its analysis of the situation, featuring three writers quibbling over whether the strike represented an “operational display,” a “warning display” or a “leadership display.”

Yoav Limor takes up the “operational display” side, but actually ends up arguing for the attack to be seen as more of a message than an end in and of itself, noting that Israel decided to hit a shipment of rockets that aren’t game changers and that Hezbollah already possesses. “A strike like this, aside from the fact that it deprives Hezbollah of many rockets that can cause large damage, make it clear to Syria and Hezbollah that Israel is serious when it says it will act to thwart weapons transfers from Syria to Lebanon, especially when we are talking about a second strike in a relatively short period. The message to the two is also sent to Iran, that Israel will fight fiercely against its enemies, in Sudan, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon.”

Hear, O Israel, Netanyahu is your PM, Netanyahu is one

Gonen Ginat (“leadership display”) meanwhile writes that the action taken shows the mettle of a true leader, and not the kind you gain from posting on Facebook, a nice little swipe at the social media-obsessed Yair Lapid. In a column that Kim Jong-un’s biographers would have been proud to write, Ginat praises not only the total media silence on the subject from official Israeli sources, but also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wondrous abilities for which we should sing his praises every day: “At a time when it seems like everyone is up to their necks in Facebook battles, [the prime minister] manages simultaneously, from the shadows, a real live war: collecting intelligence, confirming information, filtering background noise and eliminating threats.”

Haaretz reports that military intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi recently paid a secret visit to China to discuss Syria and Iran, which both see China as a key player. The paper reports that Kochavi told his Chinese counterparts that Syria’s chemical weapons, some of which were made in China (what isn’t these days?), were liable to soon fall into Hezbollah’s hands. Coupled with Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to the great Asian tiger, the visit is a bellwether of increased security cooperation between the sides, Haaretz reports.

Maariv pulls no punches on how it feels on the whole Syria tangle, displaying a large soul-breaking picture of bodies of dead children and adults piled high (mercifully on an inside page) and asking in its headline “Where has America disappeared to?” Columnist Nadav Eyal offers a scathing criticism of Barack Obama for remaining silent in the face of the slaughter of thousands in Syria and stuttering on his “red line,” which sends a less than reassuring message to Israel via-a-vis Iran. “As opposed to Russia and China, that say the Syrian civil war is an internal matter, the West has pretensions. It tries to keep the tenets of universalism and does not stop with harsh denunciations of the Assad regime. European and American leaders know they tread a thin line between the rhetoric they give their people and restrictions or realpolitik. Realpolitik is an SA anti-aircraft battery, for example, that could down nearly every Western plane. Obama makes himself out to a realpolitist with a realistic view of foreign policy, but it’s based on a liberal tradition that sees a necessary humanitarian intervention by the international community.”

Besides the outdateds, there is a smidgen of actual news in the papers.

Yedioth runs a touching tribute to children’s author Dvora Omer, who died over the weekend, juxtaposing snippets of her sweet words with bad news from the rest of the world. Thus next to a story on all the government cuts that will go into effect sooner than thought is an excerpt from “I will overcome” about a child named Gila who doesn’t think her name fits.

Israel Hayom runs a story about a study that found that 68 percent of sexual harassment victims never report what happened. The numbers as reported are a bit muddled, though since they seem to assume all 400 people surveyed knew of a sexual harassment incident. The survey also reports that more than half of respondents know somebody who was sexually harassed, with 54% believing that reporting it would do no good.

In Haaretz, Nehemia Shtrasler takes aim at the treasurer for not doing enough to rectify the mistakes of his predecessor. “It’s true Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s inheritance is a tough one. But has he done everything to fix things? For 2014 it can be said (barely) that the plan is reasonable: harsh cuts, increased taxes and a 3 percent deficit of about NIS 30 billion. But for 2013 we have a huge failure. That 4.9 percent deficit is a mistake that could bump down Israel’s credit rating and hamper growth and employment… But Lapid doesn’t want to be a bad guy. He’s not determined enough and Netanyahu has his back.”