The prison board’s dilemma

Like “Orange is the New Black” fanboys waiting for a new season, Israeli papers salivate Thursday over a then-looming parole board decision on whether former president and current convicted rapist Moshe Katsav will win his freedom, or head back behind bars for another stint as a well-heeled softy turned into a hardened panty-smuggling magnate and prison kingpin after nearly six years in the slammer.

The story isn’t the only top news, though, as it has to compete for press primacy with coverage of a fatal car crash that left two women and a baby dead after a driver, allegedly under the influence, ran a red light.
Unfortunately, fatal crashes, even ones as terrible as Wednesday’s, are man bites dog, whereas former presidents possibly getting out of a lockup are still pretty unique, at least for now.

Whereas a month ago, papers seemed pretty sure Katsav was to get a get out of jail free card, they seem less sure on Thursday, with Haaretz reporting in its front page headline that the prosecution is opposed to letting the convicted rapist go free. And indeed, the board ruled Thursday that Katsav would have to head back to his bunk for at least another six months.

But the papers did not know that when editors hit “publish” on Wednesday night, and so coverage is basically just a laying out of different scenarios with some handicapping thrown in. Like a bass-ackward Israeli cover of a Clash song, Yedioth Ahronoth covers the Katsav saga under the headline “Go home or stay in prison.”
The paper reports that Katsav, while unrepentant, has begun to at least show a little bit of contrition, which may help his case.

“In a visit prison authorities made to his cell three weeks ago they heard him being willing to be rehabilitated. ‘I’m not innocent of mistakes and faults,’ he told them. ‘My standing and power should have made me act differently. All my relations with women were mistakes,’” the paper reports.

Haaretz, piggybacking on reporting from Channel 10, reports that sources in the parole board said that Katsav’s age and his standing make his case a unique one, hinting they may play in his favor.

Once Katsav does get out, if he manages to return to politics (hey, Aryeh Deri did it), he may have a hard time visiting his old prison gang, according to a separate Haaretz story, which reports that the prison service is cracking down on visits by Knesset members to security prisoners.

The paper reports that a directive limiting lawmakers to one visit to a security prisoner per month has been in place for a year, but nobody was told, and it was only discovered after MK Yousef Jubarin (Arab List) was turned down after requesting a visit.

“This demeans the standing of lawmakers and the parliament,” Jubarin is quoted fuming in the paper. “You can’t make a decision like this harming the rights of Knesset members based on baseless general claims.”

As Katsav was looking to get sprung, another person was being sent behind bars after running a red light and killing three people in the north of the country.

Israel Hayom, which leads off with the story, doesn’t do much in the way of masking its anger and frustration over yet another fatal accident, the 211, 212, and 213 road deaths this year. The toll puts 2016 on pace to record a record 359 road deaths, surpassing the previous record of 356 set last year, though that chilling fact is not included in the coverage.

It’s not just the accidental deaths of Angelique Naim, her 2-year-old daughter Chloe and her sister Olga Ashkar that has the paper up in arms, but also the preventability of this crash.

“An initial investigation shows that the crash occurred when [Camil] Dihab, 62, from Haifa ran through the intersection, apparently under the influence of drugs, after the light had been red for 12 seconds,” the paper reports, beneath a horrific series of snapshots showing the accident occurring from a security camera.

Former MK Ze’ev Bielski, who headed the road safety lobby as a lawmaker, makes a return from obscurity to call in a column for the country to take road safety as seriously as fighting the country’s enemies, reporting that 30,000 people have been killed on the road since the country was founded.

“In war, as in war, you need to muster all your forces. The Public Security and Transportation ministries are responsible for road safety. Ministers [Gilad] Erdan and [Yisrael] Katz are public servants who have proven before that they know how to advance projects quickly and qualitatively,” he writes. “I call on them to announce a Tzav 8 [general call-up] to muster all the country’s forces in a war against road accidents. We need to use every budget necessary to improve infrastructure, advance education for road safety and increase enforcement.”

More than car crashes, though, Israel’s politicians have shown they are more concerned with train wrecks, like the one that occurred Wednesday as the Knesset marked 76 years since the death of Revisionist Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose father was Jabotinsky’s right-hand man, got up to address the plenum, politicians began squabbling over his legacy against the backdrop of alleged efforts by Netanyahu to strangle the free press, Yedioth reports, under the headline “What would Jabotinsky think about your efforts to silence the media,” taken from an Isaac Herzog barb.

“The people will judge at the voting booth and rule with the remote, that’s Jabotinsky’s law,” Netanyahu is quoted saying, trying to raise the man from the dead to back his free market and broadcasting reforms.

Haaretz’s editorial board, meanwhile, sees something telling in the confluence of Jabotinsky day and a ceremony by Netanyahu’s Likud faction to welcome far-right ultra-nationalist rapper The Shadow into the party, which Haaretz leftsplains as a sign of how far the party has strayed from Jabotinsky’s vision.

“From a liberal nationalist movement that championed Jabotinsky’s ideology, Likud has become a movement that gives expression to the views of the radical right – racism, violent hatred and a rejection of the liberal values that Jabotinsky spoke and wrote about. Instead of Jabotinsky’s version of Betar’s glory, we have Beitar’s disgrace, La Familia-style,” the paper writes, making a play of words on Jabotinsky’s Betar youth movement and the name of Jerusalem’s soccer team and its racist fan club. “How distant the vision is of this government, which advances discriminatory legislation against Arabs, from Jabotinsky’s vision of total equality for the country’s citizens.”