Pandora’s box and a jack-in-the-box

This weekend marks one year since Gil-ad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel and Eyal Yifrach were kidnapped from a bus stop outside the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut and murdered, sparking public outcry, a weeks-long military operation and numerous arrests.

Only the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper prominently notes the anniversary, however. The paper features the murdered teens on the front page, along with a two-page spread by Amos Harel and Chaim Levinson detailing the intelligence failings of the army and the Shin Bet security service — tracking a suspect who had nothing to do with the plot and only discovering the involvement of a third kidnapper two and a half weeks into the investigation.

Both Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom, meanwhile, lead with Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein’s decision to open a criminal investigation into attorney Ruth David’s role in the ongoing Ronel Fisher investigation.

In their article, “A Pandora’s box in the DA,” Yedioth outlines the case against David, who appears chinless and slack-jawed in the unflattering accompanying photograph.

The heart of the accusation against David, the article explains, is that she inappropriately accepted gifts while serving as the district attorney of Tel Aviv, with Israel Hayom offering details about an “expensive wallet and jewelry,” among other alleged bribes.

Most Hebrew news outlets prominently feature MK Miri Regev’s recent comments to artists, following the backlash against her denouncement of the Arab actor Norman Issa, who refused to perform in the West Bank.

“The artists won’t tell me what to do,” Yoav Birnberg quotes Regev as saying in Yedioth.

“We got 30 seats [in the Knesset], you only got 20,” she says, an apparent reference to the 24-seat Zionist Union and an accusation, essentially, that the gap between minister and artists is a partisan one. But her assumption that all artists are leftists surely caused conservative punk rocker Johnny Ramone and former actor/Republican president Ronald Reagan to spin in their graves.

Though the Israeli media enjoyed — perhaps too much — this week’s Oren Hazan crystal-meth-and-prostitutes scandal, most papers let that story go by the weekend, with perhaps just a scant brief detailing Hazan’s ongoing tensions with Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, as reported in Israel Hayom’s coverage.

Only Yedioth, whose animosity toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party is well documented, puts the Hazan story on its front page, not bothering to conceal its schadenfreude over the fact that a Likud politician who has called marijuana users “junkies” is now embroiled in a crystal meth controversy.

Hazan appears in a cartoon as a jack-in-the-box, tossing poker chips (but not hard drugs or round-heeled women) into the air, perhaps echoing statements Hazan made 10 days ago in which he insisted he was not, as so many Israelis seem to believe, “a clumsy clown.”

That June 2 interview may go down as the fledgling politician’s famous last words unless Hazan manages to pull out of his current tailspin.

Yedioth features an interview with Hazan’s mother Aviva in its weekend section, in which she says her son, accused by Israeli press reports of pimping, obtaining prostitutes for friends and clients on a regular basis and hard drug use, is “a role model for youth.”

“He’s a big boy,” his mother says, “no one’s going to tell him not to take pictures with girls.”

Sheldon Adelson and slaughterhouses, central committee corruption and American relations

Left-wing blogger Peter Beinart asks in Haaretz, “What does Sheldon Adelson want,” but leaves off the question mark.

Beinart discusses Adelson’s anti-boycott conference in Las Vegas this week, criticizing it for excluding J-Street and the New Israel Fund, which are both anti-BDS but also anti-occupation.

After an odd tangent insulting the Maccabees, Beinart ponders whether this recent anti-BDS push is really about boycotts at all. Perhaps, he opines, the conference and anti-BDS movement is just an opportunity for Adelson and other right-wing Zionist leaders to consolidate their power base, to strike fear into the hearts of global Jewry and bring them all under one conservative umbrella.

Haaretz also features an opinion piece by Orna Rinat who discusses the recent shuttering of the largest slaughterhouse in Israel for allegedly abusing animals.

Rinat’s comment, complete with a particularly grim photograph of the slaughterhouse, praises the work of animal rights groups in bringing about the closing.

“This is not the exception,” Rinat writes, “this is the rule. It starts the moment these animals enter the world.”

In this weekend’s Israel Hayom, meanwhile, Haim Shine writes about the recent attempts in the Likud to give its central committee the right to pick the party’s list.

Shine argues in no uncertain terms that this will lead to more corruption and will not serve the people of Israel.

The last time the central committee had this power, he writes, “the Israeli public saw how…a small group within the committee took control over the ruling party.”

The lesson seems to have been forgotten, he adds. “For many years now, law enforcement officials and the nation’s citizens have not understood the existential danger of corruption.”

Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid laments Israel’s current relationship with the United States, saying that it is worse than it appears.

“We have problems with the United States,” he writes. “Not the regular ones, the almost comedic ones, that come out from differences in style and temperament between the hushed, tie-wearing Americans and the ‘talk at full-volume’ Israelis.”

Lapid cites the recent “ugly fight” between Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama, which he says sparked a wave of criticism in the US, even among once staunch supporters like AIPAC.

The only way Israel can mend this rift, Lapid says, is for Israel to act, and not pretend to act.

Lapid quotes an anonymous White House official (most of Lapid’s quotes in the piece come from anonymous sources) who tells him that fake negotiations “are worse than if there weren’t negotiations at all.”

Lapid says that it is “difficult to describe” the negative reception by the United States of Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s recent comment that he does not anticipate an end to the conflict in his lifetime.

Even Lindsey Graham, a Republican candidate for president, tells Lapid that it is time for Israel to forget just trying to prevent something bad from happening and to begin “to act in order to have something good happen.”

George Bush, the Druze and dick pics

Israel Hayom features a huge, glowing interview with former US president George Bush.

“There’s only one thing I miss about being president: being the commander in chief of the US army,” Bush tells the paper’s Boaz Bismuth and Amos Regev.

Bush happened to be in Las Vegas for the anti-BDS conference held by the Israeli newspaper’s main funder, Sheldon Adelson, which might account for the four-page spread and softball questions like, “How did you react when they told you about the attack on the Twin Towers?”

Bush also defended his unpopular decision to send troops into the Middle East following the events of September 11, 2001. “My opinion was that we needed soldiers in the field,” he says.

Haaretz discusses the IDF’s refusal to assist the Druze population of Syria, despite requests by the Israeli Druze community’s leaders to the government.

The report explains that the Syrian Druze population is surrounded on three sides by rebel groups, the Al-Nusra Front and Islamic State. The Assad regime, however, refuses to provide the group with military support, sending troops instead to protect Allawite populations nearby.

Despite the danger, or perhaps because of it, Israel has refused to provide military assistance, driving a wedge further between the Druze population and the Israeli government, the paper reports.

On a lighter note, Yedioth provides readers with the captivating tale of a kindergartner who drew a picture of a penis.

This is not a joke.

In an article on page eight of the newspaper, which required the efforts of two (two!) journalists, Yedioth discusses a video that has appeared on social networks showing a small child who draws something decidedly phallic, and explains to his teacher that it is a picture of his father.

This Pulitzer-worthy piece of journalism is accompanied by an analysis by psychotherapist Batya Aloni, who explains to readers the potential meanings and ramifications of children drawing genitalia.

There was not, alas, an accompanying article by a psychotherapist explaining what happens to journalists on a slow news day.