Race-baiting and base-rating

Things that a year ago one would have never thought should be political are just that on the front pages of Israel’s print press Sunday morning, as the media turns one eye to the US election – where blustering tycoon Donald Trump could be on the cusp of becoming president — and casts another inward to a Tel Aviv memorial event transformed into a political rally, despite the fact there’s no election planned here, as of yet.

In the US, though, election fever is running to 107° F (41.6° C), and Israeli papers are busy sending correspondents traipsing all over the exotic reaches of the eastern seaboard — these modern-day Lewis and Clarks heading all the way west to Interstate 95 — in search of stories as the campaigns head to a finish.

Nahum Barnea reports from the solidly Democratic Philadelphia, calling it the hottest city of this election cycle, since it is located in the swing state of Pennsylvania (and honestly, who wants to schlep all the way out to Columbus, or even Pittsburgh).

“Its voters are expected to tip the scales in the favor of Democrats in Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania is supposed to tip the scales of the whole body politic,” he writes.

Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev, traveling all the way to all-important New York, where not a single vote for president will mean squat, follows the lead of The New York Times and reports that “Hispanics are heading to the polls in droves,” both a sarcastic throwback to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-pilloried warning that “Arabs are heading to the polls in droves” and a creepy reminder of Israel Hayom’s strange headline from last week crowing that “Women are seen at Trump rallies, and even some Hispanics too.”

But unlike Israel Hayom, Shalev notes that high Hispanic turnout could spell doom for the man who wants to build a bigly wall on the Mexican border and kick out immigrants, a twist that he can’t help but relish.

“It would be poetic justice, of course, if the opening salvo of Trump’s campaign, in which he described Mexicans as murderers, rapists and drug dealers, will prove the instrument of his own undoing; if the revolver that he himself put on the table in his first act during his June 2015 press conference in Trump Tower in New York will, in true Chekhovian manner, fire the bullet that kills his own political aspirations in the third,” Shalev writes.

Israel Hayom, though, is refusing to give up the ghost, and intrepid correspondent Boaz Bismuth, dispatched to Miami (where he is sure to include a boring shot of himself standing in a vacant lot), switches from Hispanics to blacks, whom he reports are far from solidly in Clinton’s camp.

Noting that it’s not clear that black voters will head to the polls to vote for someone that’s not US President Barack Obama, Bismuth gives readers a play-by-play of him stumbling into a food pantry line in the Liberty City ghetto that he thought was a line for voters. While there he decides to interview people on their voting plans anyway.

“We don’t have a horse in this race,” he quotes one person, who just a few minutes earlier said he wasn’t voting based on race alone.

“It’s not as clear as you think. Yeah, I’m going to vote for Hillary, because I don’t like Trump. But you need to understand that the candidates only remember the black vote during the elections – no matter if they’re Democrats or Republicans,” the horseless voter-to be is quoted saying.

Trump-backing Israel Hayom isn’t the only one unwilling to throw in the towel on a dream that seems more like a raisin in the sun. A Rabin memorial rally in Tel Aviv Saturday night also garners major coverage from both Yedioth and Haaretz, even as it transformed from a remembrance ceremony into an anti-Netanyahu political event, thanks to the Zionist Union party taking over sponsorship after it was nearly canceled because of a budget shortfall.

While Zionist Union head Isaac Herzog’s words – that there won’t be any unity government – make the headlines, both papers cover the rally as if it were the same as the last 20 years of the event – when efforts were made to keep it from getting too political.

“Twenty-one years after he was shot with those three fateful bullets, tens of thousands returned of Israelis returned to the square for a ceremony in memory of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin,” the paper reports with its most purple pen. “They spoke about democracy and tolerance, hope and struggles, remembrance and forgetting. Spoke and talked, just like that same bitter night in 1995: We are fighting for the future of the state.”

Commentator Oded Shalom, reporting from the rally, writes that the rally was nice and all, but featured the same old platitudes from the same people in the same place that won’t reach out beyond the square to the rest of the country.

 

“Israeli democracy has never seemed so threatened and battered. There’s incitement and threats. But from here, with all due respect, in the center of Tel Aviv, will not come the clarion call for change. Definitely not with such a homogeneous group, definitely not when it’s more concerned with standing in line for ice cream on Ibn Gvirol,” he writes.

The rally, though, is somewhat overshadowed by comments made by coalition chairman MK David Bitan just minutes before those homogeneous ice-cream licking Israelis showed up at Rabin Square, saying that the assassination was not political, but rather just a guy trying to stop a thing from happening.

That statement, plus comments that he and others have been tracking Facebook comments by employees of the new public broadcaster to out them as leftists, is all the ammo Haaretz’s Yossi Verter needs to less loose on both Bitan and his boss.

“Bitan is the politician who reflects more than his colleagues, in the most distilled and core manner, the wishes, increasing caprices and disturbing thinking of the prime minister. It would be a mistake to think that Netanyahu threw Bitan under the bus as he did with Likud minister Ofir Akunis, after he reached an agreement with Kahlon to set up a committee to examine the future of the broadcasting association,” Verter writes. “Saturday’s performance shows that Bitan is still Netanyahu’s long and crude arm and that the two are well-coordinated, on their way to run over all of us.”