People of the enemy

After months of what seemed like a nonstop carousel of diplomatic scuttlebutt, high-profile scandals, war-drums, anti-Semitism, elections and transitions of power, capped off by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington last week, the news suddenly seemed to slow to a crawl over the weekend.

The slowdown spurs major tabloids Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth to lead with domestic crime stories: an abused toddler and mafia car-bombers, the types of things the press in a country that’s a villa in a suburban subdivision, and not a jungle, might address.

But showing that the respite is more eye of the hurricane than squall’s end is a major scoop by Haaretz which was already making waves just a few hours after hitting doorsteps Sunday morning.

“Kerry offered the prime minister a regional peace plan a year ago in a secret meeting with Abdullah and el-Sissi; Netanyahu expressed doubts,” reads the paper’s top headline, blowing the lid wide open on a long-rumored initiative.

The highly detailed story, based on unnamed former Obama officials, reports on the lead-up to and fallout from the secret meeting in Aqaba, Jordan, a year ago, as well as the hush-hush summit itself, which it calls “highly dramatic,” and during which Kerry proposed to Netanyahu, Jordan’s King Abdulah and Egypt’s Abdel Fatah el-Sissi an outline covering borders, refugees, Jerusalem and other issues.

“Even though the subject was the regional peace initiative, a substantial chunk of the discussions related to the situation in the overall region. Abdullah and Sissi took Kerry to task for the Obama administration’s policies in the Middle East, both regarding Iran and Syria. Still, the two reacted positively to his proposal and tried to convince Netanyahu to accept it,” reporter Barak Ravid writes. “The former senior US officials said Netanyahu was hesitant. Instead of relating exclusively to Kerry’s plan, they said he presented a plan of his own at the four-party meeting, which he called his five-point plan. Through the plan, Netanyahu expressed a readiness to take the steps regarding the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that he had spoken with Kerry about in November 2015. He also said he would release a statement relating positively to the Arab Peace Initiative. In return, Netanyahu asked that the negotiations with the Palestinians be resumed and that a regional peace summit be convened that would include attendance by senior representatives from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Sunni Muslim countries. After several hours of talks, the leaders returned to their capitals agreeing to consider the various proposals.”

The paper reports that the immediate upshot was the resumption of unity talks with Zionist Union head Isaac Herzog that roiled the party and the country for several weeks at the time, amid rumors of such an initiative, which are now confirmed (though Netanyahu on Sunday morning said he, and not Kerry, had convened the summit).

Nearly unmentioned in the story, but highly telling, is the fact that the revelation comes mere days after Netanyahu christened US President Donald Trump as the one who could make such an initiative a reality, a statement that would seem riddled with chutzpah given what the report claims the Obama administration tried hard to do.

But to believe that, one would have to believe the media, which as Trump said Saturday, is fake, and the enemy of the people. Though it will likely be remembered as just another blip in the president’s ongoing war against the free press (a war that it seems is played mostly to distract and win brownie points more than anything else) the statement once again has the press biting back.

In Yedioth, Orly Azulay posits that Trump is blindly treading into dangerous territory with his tweets.

“In light of the extraordinary attack of his yesterday, in which he termed the largest media outlets in the US ‘enemies of the people,’ it’s doubtful if he fully understands periods in history when tyrannical rulers would term as enemies of the people inferior people who did not toe the line, dooming them to a miserable end,” she writes.

It’s not clear whether Israeli journalists are also enemies of the America people, but to be on the safe side, Yedioth brings in CNN’s unstoppable Emily Schmidt to explain that Trump’s tweets won’t keep journalists from doing their job.

“Words like this from the mouth of the president cause damage; we are a divided country. Those who believe us appreciate our work, and those who think like the president don’t believe us,” she writes, in a translation of her column from Hebrew back into English. “So, in light of this, all that we need to do as journalists is continue our work. To ask the tough questions even when we expect to be attacked, to keep our integrity and continue in our roles on behalf of the American people. We are not the enemy. We are the keepers of democracy.”

Schmidt’s high-falutin’ defense of the fourth estate contrasts sharply with a column by Chemi Shalev in Haaretz, who lets loose with a scathing attack on Trump, comparing his understanding of international affairs to that of “an 11-year-old boy, and an underdeveloped one at that.”

And he has words almost as harsh for those pundits and apologists who came out to defend Trump’s attack on the media and refusal to condemn anti-Semitism as part of some grand strategy, with what even he admits is a “preposterous analogy.”

“One can just imagine the same kind of commentators sitting in the breaking news studios in Berlin on January 30, 1939, after Adolf Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag, saying that there were indications that the Jews were indeed responsible for the hyperinflation that struck Germany and some of them were definitely looking to bring the German people to heel. And in any case, that is what Hitler’s followers believed and his delivery was as spectacular as always,” he writes. “He held his audience in the palm of his hands, and you shouldn’t take his threat to annihilate the Jewish people too seriously. It’s a staple trick of his, which only proves how the Fuhrer is still the fabulous magician he always was.”

Trump’s attack on the media even makes it into Israel Hayom, though it’s buried deep inside the paper, unlike the others, who put it on their front pages. And unlike the others, the Trump-loving tabloid isn’t exactly critical of the president. “Trump takes it up a gear,” reads the headline. “He’s not easing up,” is how the lede begins, practically cheering his initiative. And the story also makes sure to cite a Fox News poll that shows 45% of Americans trust Trump whereas 42% trust journalists.

With a margin of error of +/- 3, even Fox News — decidedly not Fake news according to Trump — calls the poll a near-dead heat.

But in Israel Hayom’s telling: “the president could take pleasure over the weekend in the Fox News survey, which showed Trump is more trusted than American journalists.”