The interior minister investigated yet again

With a mixture of disapproval and a hint of schadenfreude, Israel’s Hebrew-language newspapers report on the criminal investigation set to be opened against Interior Minister Aryeh Deri for suspected corruption, with the probe apparently centering on unreported real estate property owned by the Shas MK and members of his family, including a vacation home in northern Israel and apartments owned by each of his nine children.

“From probe to investigation,” reads the headline in Yedioth Ahronoth, alongside a photo of an apparently worried Deri clasping his hands over his mouth. The daily’s analysts and reporters cover at length the allegations against Deri, who has already served a prison sentence for past graft offenses — also committed while serving as interior minister.

“We’ll meet at the police [station],” Nahum Barnea writes to Deri in his op-ed on the matter. Barnea asserts that the decision to launch a full criminal investigation against Deri indicates that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit most probably possesses concrete evidence to implicate the interior minister, or at least has sufficient reason to assume that Deri’s real estate dealings were shady at best.

However, Barnea adds, Deri is not the politician currently facing the most trouble for his alleged misdeeds. That pleasure belongs to opposition leader Isaac Herzog, who was named this week as the previously unidentified second senior Israeli lawmaker under investigation for possible corruption.

Herzog, unlike Deri, has many enemies within his own party, the Zionist Union, and the probe into suspicions of illegal payments to his campaign during the 2013 Labor Party primary race will come as music to the ears of numerous opposition MKs, Barnea explains.

“Herzog’s political situation is not a simple one at all,” Barnea writes. “His [Labor] faction tends to switch its leaders once every [Knesset] term…the police probe is an invitation for a war of succession, not only with the participation of [rivals] Amir Peretz and Shelly Yachimovich, but also with the participation of Erel Margalit, maybe Eitan Cabel as well — both of whom backed him in the previous round.”

Meanwhile, Israel Hayom’s headline announces “a quick decision by the attorney general after news of the probe” against Deri came out. In a damning op-ed, contributor Mordechai Gilat predicts Deri will attempt to pin the accusations on racism, noting the interior minister’s past tendency to blame investigations on his Mizrahi ethnicity.

“Remember how Aryeh Deri played the public for fools in 1990 when a report was made public about his exploits and a police investigation began?” Gilat asks rhetorically. “Wearing one hat he attempted to convey a business as usual attitude, and promised to cooperate… wearing a second hat, he hired private investigators and tried to disrupt the same investigation he promised to comply with.”

Gilat notes that Deri’s method of disruption came in the form of a campaign aimed at accusing investigators of targeting him for his Sephardic roots, rather than for any actual criminal offenses.

“The false house of cards of the interior minister came tumbling down back then, the chilling testimony was uncovered, the text of his wiretapped conversations, his bank receipts, and other evidence confirmed the suspicions against him and led him to prison,” Gilat says. “Now we are returning to the same story… In one hat he once again promises to comply with police and in a second his choir begins to sing the song of racial discrimination.”

Haaretz — though it covers the allegations against Deri and Herzog — is more concerned with the second story currently rocking the nation and tearing political parties apart: the Israel Defense Forces soldier who shot a disarmed Palestinian attacker in the head last week in Hebron.

Last week, the Kfir Brigade soldier was caught on film shooting Palestinian assailant Abd al-Fattah Yusri al-Sharif in the head, some 10 minutes after the stabber had already been shot, wounded and disarmed. According to the army, the soldier said before shooting the stabber that he should be killed, and told his commanders afterward that the assailant had deserved to die. The IDF launched an investigation into the shooting immediately, and a day later the army prosecutor said he was considering murder charges against the soldier. Army prosecutors have since indicated that the soldier may only face charges of manslaughter, not murder.

In a series of op-eds and reports, left-leaning Haaretz examines the highly contentious incident in a clearly disapproving manner, with some of the paper’s writers going as far as asserting that the IDF has long suffered from a disposition towards allegedly unjust shootings. “In 1951 [prime minister David] Ben-Gurion warned of murder acts in the IDF,” contributor Gidi Weitz’s headline reads. “A string of incidents casts a heavy shadow on the maintaining of purity of arms in the army, as far back as 1948,” writes Amir Oren.

Debate over the Hebron shooting has raised a wider question over security forces’ rules of engagement during the current wave of terror, and the debate over the soldiers actions have snowballed into a political battle, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facing pressure from the far-right flank of his coalition for his backing of the army investigation.

While Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon issued statements condemning the soldier’s behavior as a violation of the IDF’s ethical code, a slew of political figures and an increasingly vocal public movement have expressed their opinion that the soldier was either completely justified in his decision to put a bullet in the unarmed assailant’s head, or at least that the soldier had in fact abided by the IDF’s rules of engagement as he feared the Palestinian could still carry out a secondary attack.

In light of the shooting, the raging debate over Israel’s war on terror seems nowhere near ready to die down, and one can expect the soldier’s case and possible trial to feature prominently in the headlines of the Hebrew-language media for some time to come.