Prophets in a pissing contest

The derailing of Tel Aviv train service for eight days, and an attempt by the US to get Mideast peace efforts — or at least the US-Israel love story — back on track via a meeting between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are at the top of the news agenda Monday morning across the print press’s three major dailies.

Yedioth Ahronoth’s front-page headline — “Eight days of disruptions” — is about as provincial as news in Israel gets, taking this former reporter back to his days of local reporting where major transportation projects that affected readers’ day-to-day life were part of the bread-and-butter of his beat.

Indeed, despite train works being caught up in a major political battle over the last several weeks, there is little more meat to the story than the headaches the station shutdowns will cause, and papers focus on news you can use, a welcome break from the political jibber-jabber and sensationalist terror coverage that normally characterize coverage, even if it does come at the expense of hundreds of thousands of people’s commutes.

Yedioth’s main news story dispenses with the conventions of inverted-pyramid style journalism and instead just presents its information as a Q&A, like it’s some sort of brochure. (Israel Hayom also employs a Q&A as a sidebar.)

The first question is not “What did we do to deserve this?” but it might as well be, given Israelis’ propensity for “Woe-is-me” whining. Yet trying to put the best spin on things, Yedioth explains that the work is actually for a good cause.

“The Jerusalem-Tel Aviv line will be the first in Israel to be electric, so it will be faster and less polluting. This requires moving the tracks to make room for electric charging stations for the railcars and fitting the platforms for the electric trains, which will be longer than the current ones. This means pouring concrete, which takes more than the 48 hours afforded by a weekend. Thus it’s possible that in the coming months, the train will be shut down in the same area for a few days,” the paper reports.

An accompanying story combines Israelis’ three favorite pastimes — whining; whining while using overwrought bombast; and whining while telling the future with absolute certainty — as commuters get started early complaining about the delays they will likely have.

“The traffic jams in the morning will be a catastrophe. A huge balagan,” one commuter is quoted as saying, using the Hebrew loan-word for “clusterfutz.” “They should just finish the work already and let us live. How much more suffering can we take from them, closing the train every other day. We’re sick of this management.”

Israel Hayom calls the closures “the day dreaded by all,” and given the less than confidence-inspiring pep talk by the Egged bus company, which will have to deal with the spillover (including asking Israelis to be patient, which is like asking a dog to not lick peanut butter) it’s not hard to see why.

“The public is asked to be cool and patient at the Egged stations. Egged travel officials estimate that one way or another we’ll overcome the extra demand for service, just like we always deal with transportation problems in Israel,” the company is quoted as saying.

In Haaretz, the train merits barely a blip of coverage. Instead, the paper focuses on an upcoming meeting between Netanyahu and Obama, reporting that rather than use the opportunity to count out each of the 38 billion dollars the US is giving Israel (as heads of state do), the US president will use the opportunity to get to some stuff about a certain two-state solution that has been weighing on his mind.

The paper does little reporting beyond transcribing the statements of the White House and Netanyahu’s office announcing the meeting, but is sure to toot its own horn in noting that it reported on efforts to broker a powwow a day earlier. Kudos.

One-upping Haaretz, Yedioth also touts the fact that it predicted the meeting, going so far as to include a picture of its headline from September 1 proving as much. The paper also reports that the US president is putting together a so-called “Obama outline” to propose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian woes, including land-swaps, the fate of Jerusalem and border arrangements, plus so much more.

“The US sees [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas and Netanyahu as old news,” a senior American official is quoted saying in the paper. “The Obama outline will be much wider and not pointed [on one thing]. It will be on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but with a wider regional view.”
Somehow, despite the US making it clear that the two-state solution will be at the center of the talks, Israel Hayom almost totally leaves that out of its write-up. Instead, their story focuses on Netanyahu’s never-ending gratitude for the wad of defense aid and the amazingly close ties between the US and Israel.

According to the report, the White House first emphasized the close ties and only after said that also under discussion would be “the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal, the situation in the Middle East and the commitment to break the status quo between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

The disregard for the two-state solution shown by the tabloid — seen as the mouthpiece for Netanyahu and by extension, his Likud party — goes hand in hand with a scathing column by Haaretz political analyst Yossi Verter, who goes on the attack against the faction for its support of a law to “kosher” the illegal Amona outpost, calling them the “government’s extreme-right flank” after coalition partners Jewish Home and Yisrael Beytenu even admitted the cause was lost.

“This is no more than a sorry joke, a tasteless parody by a ruling party that has lost all shame and divested itself of any vestige of responsibility, norms and statesmanship,” he writes. “Not one Likud minister has yet found the courage to tell the settlers what’s clear as day: There will be no such law. Amona will be evacuated and razed, because its houses were built in sin on Palestinian-owned land. And the same fate will befall other settler houses built in violation of the law.”