Praise all around for a speech well delivered
Netanyahu's address to the UN receives top marks from the press, including those who disagreed with him
Guess whose United Nations speech, and the highly anticipated prop he used to highlight Hamas war crimes, headlines all the newspapers on Tuesday morning? If you guessed Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Erlan Abdyldayev, you’re close, but no cigar.
The headlines in Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom quote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s accusation that Hamas committed war crimes during Operation Protective Edge, and that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was responsible for them. Haaretz decides to cite the prime minister making a more conciliatory remark, that the key to peace between Israel and the Palestinians lies not in Jerusalem or Ramallah, but in Cairo and Riyadh. (Check out The Times of Israel’s full coverage of Netanyahu’s speech here.)
Israel Hayom’s reporter really goes the whole nine yards on his coverage, sandwiching the full text of the speech translated to Hebrew between a whopping three paragraphs of introduction and responses. As every year, Dr. Haim Shain, an Israel Hayom frequent columnist, says he was thrilled that an Israeli leader “represented an island of enlightened democracy in the heart of an ocean raging with radical madness and violence” — presumably he meant Manhattan.
Shain says Netanyahu’s target audiences were Israelis back home, the American government and European leaders. The PM painted Abbas as not a partner for peace for Israelis, he aimed at Washington with his remarks about radical Islam and Hamas, and his comparison of Iran to Nazi Germany was meant for the Europeans, Shain writes.
“Netanyahu spoke clear Zionist truths,” Shain says. “Commentators in the Israeli media deny the truth. We’re fortunate that the majority of the public prefers the truth to the illusions and pipe dreams.”
Shockingly, however, it’s Yedioth Ahronoth which dedicates four whole pages to its coverage of the speech. Nahum Barnea gushes that Netanyahu’s speech was perfect in every way, shape and form. “Had his father, Professor Benzion Netanyahu, been alive (he died in 2012), he would have been delighted,” he says, with only a hint of sarcasm running through the entirety of his op-ed. Of Netanyahu’s simplistic premise that Hamas = Islamic State = Islamic Republic of Iran, Barnea says “How simple. How correct,” but later notes that the comparison is “unfounded.”
Turning to criticism of Netanyahu, Barnea writes that attentive ears would have noticed that at a certain point the prime minister switched from the first person plural to the first person singular.
“I believe, I am prepared for a historic compromise, there are people who don’t take Israel’s security seriously. I take it [seriously]. I always take it. As if to say to the world: perhaps there are other Israelis you can cope with, but you have to deal with me!” Barnea writes, and suggests that Netanyahu is an egomaniac who’s let five years in power go to his head.
Haaretz runs no fewer than three analysis/op-ed pieces in addition to its substantial reportage on Netanyahu’s speech and the reactions to it. The paper’s main takeaway from the address was the prime minister’s call for an update to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative in accordance with the changing face of the Middle East. While Netanyahu said that thawing relations between Israel and certain Arab states may bring about peace with the Palestinians, Haaretz calls him out for “not present[ing] a practical and detailed plan for that end.”
Haaretz’s Yossi Verter says Netanyahu’s speech was a finger in the eye of US President Barack Obama, by criticizing what he perceived as the duplicity of Washington’s war against the Islamic State simultaneous to negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.
He also says that Netanyahu responded to Abbas’s “outlandish” genocide speech in kind from the same podium by reminding the Palestinian leader of his bedfellows in Hamas. “Negotiations between these two men won’t resume — that’s already clear, given their mutual lack of trust and respect — and especially not while the cooperation between Abbas and Hamas continues,” Verter writes.
Verter says that Netanyahu offered “no plan, no vision, nothing” in terms of peace with the Arab world, “Just the same stale old phrase about his willingness to reach a historic compromise.”
Despite his criticism, Verter, like Barnea, gives Netanyahu plaudits for his delivery, saying that while the content was flawed, the delivery was “superb” and that “nobody can best Netanyahu in this arena.”
Most astonishing of all, the political cartoonists barely touch Netanyahu’s signature use, as predicted, of a prop — a photo of Hamas rocket launchers with Palestinian children beside them — during his speech. Only Israel Hayom runs a cartoon with Netanyahu, a complimentary one at that, showing him with a bottle of air freshener.
