Shooting down planes, shooting down deals — or not
Those who stopped Ariel Sharon from downing a passenger jet are hailed, and papers survey the PM’s blitz against the Iran deal and a ‘nonexistent’ migrant pact with Rwanda
Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor
A day late and a few paragraphs short, Israeli papers finally latch on Thursday morning to Ronen Bergman’s blockbuster report in The New York Times about Ariel Sharon’s unsuccessful campaign to assassinate Yasser Arafat.
Along with taking a walk down memory lane, the papers also tackle issues of a more contemporary vintage, including efforts to convince Europe to rework the Iran nuclear deal, which have about as much chance of success as Sharon had with Arafat, and the looming deportation of thousands of migrants.
Unlike The New York Times, both Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth, which Bergman also works for, focus their headlines on the shocking revelation that Sharon ordered passenger jets shot down in order to take out Arafat.
Poor Haaretz is at a disadvantage in having to begin each paragraph of its story with “according to Bergman,” a problem Yedioth doesn’t have since it has Bergman actually rewrite his New York Times piece, or at least the juiciest parts, for them.
The tabloid also features a bonus, a column from Bergman in which he waxes philosophical on the intersection of assassinations and morality and clearly lays out how wrongheaded he thinks Sharon was. The column is full of name-dropping of spymasters, army brass and others in the high stakes tug of war of how far to go to take out the Palestinian leader.
“This is a story about the ethics of fighting and safeguarding ‘the purity of arms,’” he writes, using a Hebrew term for the idea that soldiers need to use their weapons for good and not evil. “Despite the strong desire, and that’s putting it lightly, of Sharon and Raful [Eitan] (and according to Oded Shamir, Sharon’s military adviser, also [Menachem] Begin) to kill Arafat at any price, officers both junior and senior rose up and in words or deeds stopped whatever action would endanger the lives of innocents. David Ivri, Uzi Dayan, Aviem Sella, Amos Gilboa and others are the real heroes of this story.”
Israel Hayom completely ignores the story, playing up (along with Yedioth) the deaths of two Israeli children in a car crash in the West Bank late Tuesday night and (not along with Yedioth) the non-news that the free daily is the most-read paper in the country.
The tabloid gives the widest coverage, though, to its dear friend Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on a mission in Davos to shoot down the Iran nuclear deal, at least in its current form, and faces at least as tough a crowd as somebody who wants to shoot down passenger planes.
Yet the paper plays up what victory it can, including Germany apparently saying it is investigating the nuclear deal. The news — which was denied by Berlin, though the paper reports that the German embassy in London confirmed it — is hurrahed almost as much as if German Chancellor Angela Merkel had said she was ripping up the agreement right then and there.
“I’m satisfied our stance was well understood,” the paper quotes Netanyahu saying.
The news is also enough for columnist Eldad Beck to write that Europe is finally coming around to US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu’s less-than-sanguine view of the deal.
“In European capitals they love to demean and tear down President Trump, to see him as the ‘bad child’ of the West. But the Europeans can’t ignore the power of Washington or the consequences of an American pullout from the deal,” he writes. “If they want to save what little they achieved in freezing the Iranian nuclear program for a limited time, they need to consider Trump’s threats to nix the agreement and look at how they can fill the many holes in it.”
Yedioth’s coverage of the Davos “blitz,” in its telling, is filled with non sequiturs, like a headline that “Iran is on the table,” over a picture of Netanyahu holding his wife’s hand across a table (and another picture of their very sick dog). Adding to the strange brew, columnist Yoav Fromer compares Netanyahu to Shimon Peres, a Davos stalwart, and says he’s falling into the same traps he once warned of.
“Ironically — even absurdly — the man who for years attacked Peres for his unrealistic outlook is showing signs of having been struck by the same ailment,” he writes. “Just like Peres would talk about a new Middle East just as the Old Middle East was rising enthusiastically — and Netanyahu didn’t hesitate to attack him for it in the last elections — now the prime minister talks about economic opportunities even as the world insists on solving diplomatic issues.”
Haaretz also covers the Davos meetings, but apparently puts less stock in the idea that the Iran deal is out the window, reporting dryly on Netanyahu’s chat with Merkel and his comments that “she doesn’t necessarily agree with the way we want to deal with [the deal].”
The broadsheet has much more to say about a different deal, or lack of one, namely the supposed secret deal for Israel to send its African migrants to Rwanda. The paper leads off with an interview with a top Rwandan diplomat, who says his country won’t take anybody who is being forced out and there’s no secret deal with Israel to do so.
“We don’t have any deal. If some government sends people to Rwanda as part of some deal that does not exist, against their will, of course we won’t take them” the paper quotes deputy foreign minister Olivier Nduhungirehe telling it. “We can’t take anybody as part of a deal that does not exist. I don’t know why people are talking about this deal.”
Piggybacking on that, the paper’s lead editorial proposes that with Rwanda unwilling to take them in, the Israeli government should just forget about its deportation plans.
“Rwanda’s vehement denials are worrisome and make it even more crucial for Israel to publish the agreement, assuming it exists. Israel cannot ignore the denials and send people to a state that has said it will not accept them. In the face of the government’s unacceptable plans, the initiatives by ordinary citizens are a breath of hope,” the editorial reads. “The wave of letters, petitions and demonstrations against deportation has been joined by pilots and crew members calling on airlines to refuse to fly asylum seekers against their will. Many have also undertaken to protect asylum seekers by taking them into their homes. Perhaps these efforts will lead [Interior Minister Aryeh] Deri and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop this folly at the last minute.”
In Israel Hayom’s op-ed page, support for the deportations is at an all-time high, with even medieval Jewish giant Maimonides weighing in in support of kicking them out according to columnist Moti Karpel, who says the rabbi ruled that Jews can only accept non-Jews in Israel after the complete ingathering of the exiles of Diaspora Jews.
“As long as we are in the middle of figuring out our identity and our land, our essence and our goals, we don’t have the strength to take in others. Only after a complete ingathering of the exiles, the complete basing of the Jewish people in Israel, and with ‘everyone settled how they need to be’ we will be able to take upon ourselves — and even then only in very limited cases — allowing strangers to live in our midst,” he writes. “ Until then, we cannot swallow them within our midst; having them among us leads to tensions and destructive conflicts of interest, they will hurt us, and us them.”
