Press takes a dig at Netanyahu after Gaza war report

The Hebrew newspapers give their own verdict Wednesday on the state comptroller’s report into the failings of the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip. Does it come as a surprise that Israel Hayom glosses over the major findings that cast a damning light on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet and his handling of the conflict? Yedioth Ahronoth, Haaretz and Maariv, by contrast, all present the government watchdog’s conclusions as clear as day on their front page before diving into the dirty business of digesting the massive report and spitting it back out for their readers.

“Comptroller: The cabinet didn’t debate diplomatic alternatives to a war at all,” reads the headline on the front page of Haaretz, which caps six op-eds attempting to make sense of the implications of the report. Maariv opts to highlight the report’s finding that the government demonstrated “a failure of the tunnels”: the cabinet wasn’t briefed, the IDF wasn’t prepared, and not all the subterranean targets were destroyed. On the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth appears a similarly grim accounting of the state’s handling of the war: “We didn’t prepare for the threat of the tunnels and hid it from the cabinet. Didn’t deal with the crisis in Gaza in order to halt the escalation [of hostilities]. Didn’t succeed in eliminating the tunnels, and the threat still exists.”

Israel Hayom, by comparison, sets the agenda clearly in favor of the Netanyahu government. The IDF chief of staff’s milquetoast response to the comptroller’s report leads on the front page, overwhelming the paltry headline informing readers of the “ongoing failure of dealing with the tunnels.” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, who wasn’t in command of the military during the 2014 war and whose hands are largely clean from the whole affair, is quoted on the front page saying “lessons were learned, the IDF is not immune to criticism.” Not even Netanyahu’s flimsy response that the ensuing relative calm in the south justifies the botching of the war gets bigger billing.

Israel Hayom’s defensiveness is further exhibited by the fact that the newspaper rolls out op-eds by administration guard dogs Boaz Bismuth and Yoav Limor on Pages 2 and 3 before even getting to the substance of reporting. Shockingly, Maariv is the only paper to run a hard news report about the findings of the state comptroller’s report before indulging its analysts and pundits. All too predictably, the op-eds play off the groanworthy pun relating to lights at ends of tunnels: “Darkness at the end of the tunnel” in Haaretz, “No leader at the end of the tunnel” in Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom’s overly optimistic “The light at the end of the tunnels.”

The report doesn’t point the finger of criminal culpability at any of Israel’s leaders, Haaretz writes in its editorial, “as if the finger of God instructed the IDF to go to war and sabotaged the operational, diplomatic and moral handling” of the conflict. The thousands of dead and tens of thousands of homeless Palestinians and 73 Israelis and a foreign worker killed in the summer war are “the wretched result of the operation, which was born as vengeance for the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens.”

“It seems that according to the comptroller, and IDF brass and political leaders, the policy and strategy were perfectly sound and only the execution was lacking,” it says, and thus “they are enabling the next round of violence in the Gaza Strip.”

As Israel Hayom’s upbeat headline suggests, there’s pigheaded optimism and complete disregard for the issue at hand to come in Boaz Bismuth’s op-ed.

“Operation Protective Edge wasn’t a failure,” he says. “The IDF didn’t lose. It even achieved the objectives put before it.” If Israel had wanted to flatten Gaza in less than 51 days, it could have, he says.

“We heard pundits explaining yesterday that the most important thing in the report is that the government of Israel headed by Netanyahu didn’t weigh diplomatic alternatives to the Gaza campaign,” he says. (Not exactly. You can see that in the report itself.) “Could it be that the operation took place so long ago that we forgot why we even launched the operation? Have we perhaps forgotten the kidnapping of three teens and their execution on the orders of Hamas in Gaza, by Hamas operatives? Have we forgotten the shooting from Gaza at Israeli towns?”

He makes the same tired argument heard several times — the Elor Azaria effect — that such investigative reports “undermine the capabilities of decision makers, and in particular harm future operational capabilities.”

He regurgitates familiar platitudes about Israel protecting civilians from rockets while Hamas protects rockets with civilians, and a handful of other talking points, clearly ignoring the civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip during the war and the state comptroller’s findings. Bismuth’s light at the end of the tunnel is “a decisive victory over Hamas — if and when it makes a grave mistake and tries to hurt us again.”

His closing remark is a shameless attack on the State Comptroller’s Office in the same vein as the prime minister’s earlier this week. “Hamas claimed yesterday that it won Operation Protective Edge, but that’s certainly not owing to its performance on the battlefield. More because of the [state comptroller’s] report.”

Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea reiterates his familiar trope that Israel has no quality leadership, and his Page 2 op-ed is a lengthy summary of the report’s criticism of Netanyahu’s handling of the war.

“Netanyahu is the main target for criticism in the report,” Barnea says. “Netanyahu didn’t operate like a leader: he didn’t outline policies because he doesn’t have policies; he didn’t express his opinion because he doesn’t have an opinion. This vacuum could have been filled by the defense minister, but according to the report that also didn’t happen.”

“The most difficult finding of the comptroller’s report on Operation Protective Edge only exists between the lines: if tomorrow we enter a new military conflict in Gaza, he will manage it like the previous operation.”