Passover holiday tragedy-athon

The 10 plagues of Passover for the modern State of Israel are traffic jams, bad food, unpredictable weather, lice, heatstroke, dehydration, crowded beaches, hangovers, missing persons and car accidents. The latter two preoccupy the Hebrew newspapers on Thursday morning after three people went missing on the Sea of Galilee while floating on the water and two people were killed in a head-on collision on a highway in southern Israel.

All three newspapers feature the same lackluster photo of a police boat on the Sea of Galilee taking part in the search for three young vacationers who drifted into the middle of the lake on Wednesday. What’s remarkable about the photo is that even after this historically dry winter, the Sea of Galilee is apparently still big enough to hold a boat. Haaretz reports that the three, separately, were swept up to a kilometer offshore into the middle of the body of water in “heavy winds.” One man who was rescued after his blow-up raft was carried into the middle of the pond said that his friend disappeared.

By the sound of the reporting you’d think the vacationers were swept into the Mediterranean or the Pacific trash vortex, not a freshwater lake barely 12 kilometers across at its widest point.

In its typical style, Yedioth Ahronoth‘s coverage of the death of two drivers in a twisted metal crash focuses heavily on pulling on heartstrings over the death of a beautiful woman — an only child who served in a combat unit in the IDF and happened to be extremely photogenic. What a tragedy! The young Bedouin man who was killed in the crash gets far less attention. Israel Hayom offers an even more grim outlook, reporting that six people died under various circumstances across the country in what the paper calls “consecutive tragic incidents.” The spotlight is on the three missing persons in the Sea of Galilee, with the paper saying there is “a large question mark hanging over the fate” of the three.

When not breaking down the latest local tragedies, Haaretz reports that the police closed criminal cases filed by Palestinians concerning alleged crimes committed against them by Israelis, without opening investigations into the matters,which in some cases had eyewitness or video testimony against the accused. The paper cites a Yesh Din report about one closed case in which West Bank settlers attacked a Palestinian home in the presence of IDF soldiers, and the incident was recorded on video, but police shut the case without investigating it. The paper also reports on a draft bill that, if passed, would allow rabbinic courts to weigh in on civil matters.

The “thunderous silence” from the Netanyahu and Trump administrations over the White House press secretary’s comments about Adolf Hitler’s murder of Jews during the Holocaust grabs the attention of Yedioth Ahronoth. Sean Spicer caused an uproar when he told reporters the other day after Syria apparently used chemical weapons against civilians that Nazi Germany “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” during World War II. While a handful of Israeli officials joined the Jewish outcry over Spicer’s remarks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a frequent watchdog of all things Holocaust and anti-Semitism related, remained silent.

The newspaper’s pundit Sima Kadmon says it’s not hard to guess that had it been the good ol’ days with Obama in office, “what a cry would have been heard issuing forth from Jerusalem. Such wall-to-wall condemnations.” She says that Spicer, “who’s impossible to see as anything but an idiot and complete boor,” apparently doesn’t mean enough to Netanyahu to deign to respond.

“You can glean from this that only Netanyahu’s fear of Trump exceeds his dread of the possibility of another Holocaust,” she says.

Haaretz also publishes a daily editorial in which it denounces Spicer’s “personal ignorance” and says that “you don’t need to be a diploma-holding historian to know that Hitler murdered millions with gas starting in 1939 and that among the victims were citizens of his country, Jews and non-Jews.”

“No less outrageous is the lack of response, or feeble reference, by the Israeli government or its premier concerning these statements and the like from the workshop of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ideological partners in America and Europe,” the paper says. The fact that the Israeli government — aside from Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz’s sole condemnation — didn’t speak up out of “cold diplomatic considerations,” Haaretz says, exposes the hypocrisy of the Jewish state.

Israel Hayom, on the other hand, plays up Spicer’s apology for the remarks, and only afterwards reports on Yad Vashem’s condemnation of his comments and Katz’s call for Spicer to apologize or resign. It doesn’t mention the prime minister’s silence on the issue.