Singing a song of summer

With the Knesset on recess, government ministries on vacation and school holidays in full swing, Israel’s summer months sometimes present a lack of newsworthy stories to be splashed across the front pages of the daily papers. At other times, late August in particular, there may a total lack of news altogether.

But with columns to be filled (and indeed media reviews to be written), newspapers and journalists must dig deep to find the stories that matter. And if that doesn’t work, well, how about a song?

Yedioth Ahronoth deals with the slow news cycle by giving prominence to stories (and songs) that may not always get such in-depth coverage. And by including really big pictures.

Half of the paper’s front page is filled with a pensive-looking photo of the iconic Israeli musician Nachum Heiman, who passed away Wednesday at the age of 82.

A renowned folk music composer and Israel Prize laureate, Heiman’s legacy is immortalized not just by the 40 albums and over 1,000 songs to his name, but by the hugely extensive coverage in Yedioth’s Thursday edition dedicated to his life and death. The first four pages of the paper are entirely filled with stories about and memories of Heiman, and small box in the corner of almost every other page of the paper shows his photo accompanied by the lyrics to songs he composed.

But, unfortunately, the tribute to Heiman cannot fill the entire paper and Yedioth is forced to include some other news on its pages.

Underneath the aforementioned photo on the front page, the paper runs two large headlines directing readers to stories buried deep inside: “The bacteria that we eat,” detailing the possible dangers of ingesting food in 2016 Israel, besides the cases of salmonella and listeria discovered in recent days; and, “Pausing on the way to the wedding,” a report on new figures by the Central Bureau of Statistics showing that Israelis are getting married older, released ahead of Tu B’Av, a holiday known as the “Jewish Day of Love,” which this year will fall on Friday.

That particular story covers a two-page spread on pages 14 and 15 with the headline “A country of singles,” adorned with hearts and full of statistics about how unloving Israelis have become.

Under the curious sub-headline, “Love without spooning,” the paper reports that since 1970, the average age for an Israeli male to get married has risen by two and a half years to 27.6 years old, up from 25; for women, the jump has been 3.3 years, to 25 years old.

While the paper does include coverage of Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman’s comments from a day earlier outlining his “carrot and stick” approach to tackling terror and the rift between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, it is notable thin on commentary, providing succinct news reports instead.

Israel Hayom takes a similar approach to Yedioth, featuring Heiman’s passing as the lead to its front page followed by a two-page spread on the composer. While the paper does not print any of his compositions in full, it does include a space-consuming list of all his top hits.

In a break with its tabloid rival, however, Israel Hayom does include some hard news on its front page, choosing to run Liberman’s comments with the headline, “Outrunning Abu Mazen with a ‘carrot and a stick.'”

Inside the paper, columnists Haim Shine and Dan Margalit spar over the defense minister’s suggestion of opening channels of dialogue with Palestinian leaders other than PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been irrelevant for years. He has no influence on the ground, and he will make every effort not to hold elections, understanding that he would lose to Hamas,” writes Shine. “The Israeli left placed a great deal of hope in this Holocaust-denier and, in an absence of existential logic, claims that given the alternative, a deal with Abbas is preferable. There are only two problems: The day Abbas signs a deal is the day he will be killed, and no Palestinian will honor such an agreement.”

Margalit on the other hand describes the suggestions as “yet another chapter in Lieberman’s bull-in-a-china-shop mentality.”

“He is flying solo, using the state’s agencies, but Netanyahu has not uttered a word. Netanyahu is too busy because he has too many portfolios. His staffers are leaving him. But he must do something to stop and tame the wild minister,” Margalit concludes.

Haaretz, as befits a serious broadsheet, leads with a exclusive report that Arab states will not demand a vote on Israel’s nuclear arms at IAEA conference in September.

“The Arab states, led by Egypt, plan to refrain this year from seeking a vote on a resolution regarding the oversight of Israel’s nuclear facilities during the International Atomic Energy Agency’s general conference next month, according to a cable sent to several Israeli embassies abroad, whose contents reached Haaretz,” the paper’s Barak Ravid reports.

While Haaretz certainly has its fair share of articles that may not have been placed so prominently if it were not lazy summer’s day (a front page article on a small rise in child benefits and a feature on the difference between Chinese and Western diets) it only runs a very short article on its front page about Heiman, directing readers to a longer piece in its culture pages. It doesn’t even include a song.

But had it been desperate to fill space, it may have gone with Heiman’s apt 2006 hit “I keep singing”:

Like wind in the mountains,
Like a song without a melody,
Like the rustle of the cypress tree,
Like a fire not extinguished,
Like a wanderer that passed,
Without saying a word.

I keep singing,
I keep seeing,
I keep dreaming,
About all that was.

Like a sea that did not fall asleep,
Like a wandering deer,
Like a voice that was not silenced,
Like land that was not sown,
Like a tamarisk in the desert,
Like barren land.

As the summer has faded away,
Across the dream of light,
Like a song that cannot be shaken off,
As an autumn that has not passed,
As melodies of prayer,
Of a never-ending song.

Like an eagle in the desert,
Like a rustle in the air,
Like a song without a melody,
Like a melody without a song,
Of light that is not kindled,
I keep singing.

(Translation by Ruth Schoenberg and Ruth Goodman)