Oh, the depths you’ll go to

From a print news perspective, there’s pretty much no lousier time for major news to happen — like Israel and Syria getting in their most serious military confrontation since 1973 — than at 3 a.m. Friday morning, mere hours after finished weekend editions were sent to the printer, and some 50 hours before they will have their next chance to reach readers’ doorsteps.

Alas, such is the nature of the beast. What print publications may lack in currency, though, they make up for with depth.

For the literalists — Yedioth Ahronoth leads off its paper with a look at the tunnel being bored under Tel Aviv. But for more figurative depths, one need look no further than the papers using the weekend break to take deep dives into swampy sludge of coalition infighting. And Israel Hayom inadvertently shows the depths of some others by playing up arguable hypocrisy in reporting on the “lenient” sentence MK Basel Ghattas will get in a plea deal after he admits to smuggling phones to Palestinian terrorists in prison.

Hypocritical, because two years in prison is six months more than soldier Elor Azaria got for killing somebody — an assailant yes, but still an illegal use of deadly force. Whereas the day after the Azaria sentencing, the paper ran a headline screaming “Pardon him,” quoting the laundry list of politicians calling for him to be let go, this time the paper calls the sentence for Ghattas “lenient” right on its front page and plays up right-wing anger over the fact that he won’t spend more time behind bars.

“The punishment will severely harm deterrence and will lead to terrible things like this being done in the future,” MK Robert Ilyatuv, the same MK who supported Azaria being set free, is quoted saying.

Yedioth Ahronoth also calls the punishment “lenient” in its headline, but buries the story. Instead it brings to the surface the much more important tale of a big hole being dug under Tel Aviv, to make room for the light rail. The story is big on pictures and random stats, like the size and tonnage of digging machine “Goldie,” but low on having much news value, making the machine not the only thing that’s boring.

“The work is continuing at a quick pace,” the paper reports. “So far it has dug out 140 meters, and despite the fear that shifting grounds will damage train tracks overhead — the reason they stopped trains in the area for a few days — the work going on below isn’t felt above.”
The story also quotes Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, who is happy to take credit for pushing along the “stuck” project, comparing the work of Chinese laborers beneath Tel Aviv to the early Zionist settlers of the pre-state era.

“This is an amazing historic project,” he’s quoted saying. “The pioneers drained the swamps, and now the pioneerism is being expressed with the creation of a new mass transportation project for Israel.”

There’s one swamp they did not drain, and that’s in central Jerusalem, where the coalition is getting sucked deeper and deeper into a pair of quagmires.

In Haaretz, political columnist Yossi Verter breaks down the squabbles, starting with a tiff between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Moshe Kahlon over the new public broadcaster, but predicts that the government will survive the rough patch.

He offers little proof for the assertion, instead spending reams on going into the soap opera between Netanyahu and Kahlon, including the prime minister trying to steal the finance minister’s thunder by claiming tax cuts and other successes while fanning the flames of the soon be to defunct IBA to serve his political purposes.

“Kahlon is definitely upset. He’s become the bad guy, the terminator, while Netanyahu emerges relatively unscathed. Kahlon understands full well what’s going on. You would have to be totally out of it not to detect the grubby fingerprints of the prime minister and his aides,” Verter writes.

But he predicts Kahlon may come out on top after Netanyahu again attacked the new broadcaster at a coalition event Wednesday night.

“The acute crisis between Netanyahu and Kahlon, which until then was confined to backrooms, was revealed for all to see. It exploded and scattered in every direction like a clump of mud, or something less pleasant, that’s thrown at the fan,” he writes. “The next day everyone met at the cabinet meeting. Netanyahu probably realized that he shot himself in the foot the previous evening. He was conciliatory. With Aryeh Deri’s mediation, a ‘compromise’ was reached, which for Netanyahu was total capitulation. … Kahlon has no intention of nodding in agreement with Netanyahu’s every whim like an old bobblehead. He’s in an entirely different mood. “

Also writing about the Netanyahu-Kahlon spat, Yedioth focuses on what it calls Netanyahu’s “original excuse,” when he claimed that his “Mizrachi gene acted up,” referring to Jews from communities in Arab lands and playing on the stereotype that they are hot-tempered and quick to act without thinking, unlike their lighter-skinned Ashkenazi brethren.

Columnist Meirav Batito comes out and calls Netanyahu’s comment offensive, writing that just because the prime minister claimed to have traced ancestry back to Spain doesn’t give him a pass to make racist comments, especially as much of Likud’s voting base keeping him in power are these same Mizrahim he made fun of.

“Netanyahu may know how to tell his voters what they love to hear, he’s a champion at backing the army and being a security hawk, but at the moment of truth, a sliver of light on the wall — and suddenly the brave fighter of the 1960s from the sayeret Matkal commando unit come out. Then, as a young officer from a white privileged bubble, he still didn’t know the hundreds of thousands who would vote for him, the majority coming out to the polls from periphery areas and from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds,” she writes. “It’s doubtful how much he has learned since then in how much he really understands the residents of the development towns, which vote for Likud by a large majority, and where a large percentage of the voters have that same jumping Mizrahi gene.”

Under the shared headline of “crisis to crisis” the paper also tackles the other major crisis plaguing the coalition, over the fate of a rabbi at the head of an army-linked school degrading women and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman threatening to cut funding, earning the anger of Education Minister Naftali Bennett and refusal to apologize from Rabbi Yigal Levinstein and his buds.

Israel Hayom reports that the IDF brass will meet with rabbis in a bid to smooth out the kerfuffle. In the meantime, columnist Haim Shine tries his hand at making a case for both sides to step back from their obstinate stances.

“The demand for resignations, setting an ultimatum on hand, and refusing to apologize on the other, is creating an unnecessary difficulty that is hurting everyone. As always in Israel, every argument immediately jumps to the political track, that only weighs down attempts to find a fair solution. It is necessary to speak and find a good compromise. This is an issue of life, not of votes,” he writes.

Haaretz’s lead editorial, though, writes that what’s actually needed is for society to realize that it should be the politicians, and not the rabbis, deciding on the IDF’s manpower policies, after a group of liberal Orthodox rabbis wrote a letter against mixed gender combat units.

“The rabbis are saying, we’re the ones who have to give the army our stamp of approval that implementation of the mixed-gender service order complies with our halakhic interpretations. Until we issue that approval, we’ll direct the students we educate toward other units by exploiting our influence over them,” the editorial reads. “This attitude is a challenge to the principles of control over the army in a democratic society. The defense minister must therefore cut this Gordian knot between the rabbis and the army, a knot that goes far beyond Rabbi Yigal Levinstein’s offensive speeches.”