Still life with bill pickle

Like a self-driving car’s worst nightmare, Israel avoided a head-on collision Monday. But in doing so, the country placed itself in the path of a possibly even greater doom with a legislative deal allowing for the passage of a bill to essentially legalize illegal outposts while moving residents of one — Amona — to a plot of slightly less dubious legality.

That sense of both relief at untangling one strand of the conundrum (a favorite word for the press regarding this affair) while more troubles loom is crystallized in Israel’s Hebrew media Tuesday. It’s the journalistic equivalent of Wile E. Coyote suspended in air four feet off a cliff while looking down in dread.

Despite the fact the compromise left nobody truly happy – as compromises do – and the fact that the bill has as much chance of standing up to a court challenge as the coyote has of catching roadrunner, not to mention that Amona residents have rejected the deal, Israel Hayom’s front page has a picture of settlers on the doomed hilltop dancing in the moonlight to celebrate the bill’s passage in its preliminary reading Monday.

Painting a somewhat more realistic picture of the quagmire the issue represents is the paper’s headline: “Without Amona, with a storm.”
Yedioth Ahronoth’s headline, “The evacuation and the confrontation,” similarly depicts the two sides of Monday’s goings on, and the tabloid shows the morass to be so deep as to have created some strange bedfellows.

“The end of a day that saw many things turned upside down in the crisis surrounding the Amona evacuation found enemies Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Education Minister Naftali Bennett on the same side … and opposite them standing Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and residents of the settlement, who turned into partners against the law, despite their differing stances,” the paper’s news story reads.

While much of the Yedioth story is focused on opposition from those two parties, Haaretz, which is the only paper not to lead with Amona, includes criticism from across the Knesset aisle, specifically opposition chief Isaac Herzog calling the measure “national suicide.”

While also decrying the bill’s passage as a dark day for the Knesset and accusing lawmakers of turning into rhinoceroses (a la Eugene Ionescu’s Theater of the Absurd), Herzog’s jeremiad stopped short of the Israeli political hat-trick by not calling the move anti-democratic.

No matter, in Yedioth, columnist Shlomo Pyoterkovsky goes on the offensive against those who might throw around the criticism, letting loose with a not-so-veiled attack on the judiciary for trying to upend the will of the people and praising the bill as a corrective.

“The Regulation Bill returns the decision on the future of settlement in Judea and Samaria to its natural place, to the Knesset and government. It stops the absurdity by which jurists set policies,” he writes. “The Regulation Bill, if it does get legislated into law, will be a microcosm of democracy, and not the end of democracy.”

In Israel Hayom, columnist Haim Shine mimics Netanyahu and other politicians in the government, who made peace with the bill despite serious legal issues and have made sure to heap praise on the Amona settlers all the while.

In one sentence he writes that the bill is important in setting boundaries for what can be done in the West Bank and that there’s no justification for settling on private land, even though the bill sets terms for settling on private land. And so in the next, he seems to justify doing just that, in the name of a greater good.

“The Amona settlers, beloved and pioneers, are being forced to pay a heavy price. But because of the determination, another solution was found. They won’t leave their hilltop, but will move to a spot adjacent and in view [of the old Amona], and the pain of moving is small in comparison to the [joy of] legalization and regulation,” he writes.

The other major story in the papers Tuesday is the fall of IDB Holdings tycoon Nochi Dankner, who was sentenced to two years in prison for share price rigging.

Haaretz leads with the story and quotes heavily from the biting decision by Judge Khaled Kaboub, who handed down the sentence to the formerly powerful businessman, partially because he was so powerful and able to almost single-handedly move the stock market.

“It is very difficult to accurately estimate the damage caused to investors who followed blindly after the defendants, but there is no question that the defendants damaged trust in the stock market,” the story quotes from Kaboub’s decision.

Haaretz columnist Rotem Shtarkman notes that the sentence was the minimum the judge could give, but still says jailing Dankner is an important step against corruption, though only a step.

“Dankner’s jailing will be a continuation of the history that began with the jailing of a former prime minister, an interior minister and a former president. In that way it is a victory for the rule of law,” he writes. “But will the jailing of a figure so high up create some sort of deterrent? It seems it’s not enough.”

In Yedioth, author Yaniv Rahami writes that all of Dankner’s so-called friends, who relied on him when he was on top of the world, suddenly disappeared when he needed them most. The lesson – handouts don’t pay. As for his charitable giving, that didn’t help much either, he says.

“In Tractate Sabbath in the Talmud there are three stories that explain the saying that ‘charity saves a life.’ In Dankner’s case, charity didn’t save him from jail,” he writes. “His donations and philanthropy definitely lessened his punishment, but wasn’t enough to snag him a community service sentence. In this way the judge sent an important message to the entire business community: Charity can’t replace justice.”