The razing and the razzing

Anger among the settler community, and its backers in the august halls of power, flows through the pages of Israel’s print press Thursday morning like the shed blood of the two buildings destroyed in Beit El by High Court decree.

On the ground, that anger translated into low level scuffles between settlers and police that make for excellent pictures but amount to little more than another sad chapter in the country’s ongoing love-hate relationship with its settlers and their building activities.

But in Jerusalem, the papers report, the fury took the form of a potentially much more far-reaching attack on the sovereignty of Israel’s highest courts.

Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s supposed plan to create a separate court to rule on settlement building – presumably one more friendly to the enterprise than the High Court – makes Yedioth’s front page headline. And a call by MK Moti Yogev to have the blade of a D-9 bulldozer come down on the High Court garners its own fair share of print real estate, including its very own outpost on the front page of Israel Hayom.

Shaked, of course, didn’t actually say she wants a new court – that’s just Yedioth commentator Sima Kadmon’s reading of her criticism of the High Court ruling, though that doesn’t stop the paper from playing it the same as if Shaked had in fact started appointing friendly judges to her special settler court.

Kadmon critically recounts that Shaked told her that “there are High Court rulings that are reasonable and there are High Court rulings that go too far,” though she notes that Shaked didn’t detail which are reasonable and which are beyond the pale.

“In other words, the justice minister claims that we need another system instead of the High Court that will deal with land issues in Judea and Samaria,” Kadmon writes, noting that the idea was also proposed in the settlement-backing Levy report commissioned by the government last year. “If Shaked wants to use this clause, she will run up against Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, who opposed the implementation of the report – and obviously also the judges of the Supreme Court.”

There wasn’t any reading between the lines needed to understand Yogev, though, and the press is more than happy to document the onslaught of criticism against him and his call (which he later called metaphorical) to raze the Supreme Court with a D-9 tractor.

“You can criticize the High Court decision and even argue with it, but the unbridled destructive attack hurts the rule of law and can lead to chaos,” Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon is quoted saying in Israel Hayom.

Under the clever headline “Yesh din v’Yesh D-9,” a play on the Hebrew saying “yesh din v’yesh dayan” which translates to “there is law and there is a judge,” Haaretz’s Amir Oren writes that the comments from Yogev, a former high ranking officer in the IDF, call the whole army into question.

“It’s shocking to think that such a man reached the rank of colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, served in the elite Sayeret Matkal reconnaissance unit and commanded the Maglan special operations unit. How can we rely on such officers in combat units, as commander of a regional brigade in the West Bank or as deputy commander of the Gaza Division? Who knows how many Yogevs and Bennetts are hidden among IDF officers at all levels,” he writes.

In Israel Hayom, Dan Margalit expresses unhappiness not just with Yogev’s comments but also with those of other right-wing politicians who questioned the High Court and the army for carrying out the demolition, while also criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for rewarding the hard-liners with new settlement construction.

“It would have been better had Netanyahu not decided now to build 300 new homes. The move is seen as compensation to those stormily opposing the High Court decision,” he writes. “There’s room to build, but not as compensation. Instead, there is room to give [Ze’ev] Elkin, [Naftali] Bennett, [Yariv] Levin and Yogev a basic seminar on the essence of democracy.”

That’s not to say the paper was necessarily on board with the razing of the unfinished homes in Beit El. Commentator Moti Tuchfeld calls the move as well as the protest “unnecessary, bizzare, dumb, stupid and messed up.” And that’s just in his first two lines.

“So what are we left with? With two days charged, tense and intense, and mostly unnecessary, that won’t leave a single trace, with one reverberating comment on an army bulldozer that needs to come down on the court, and all this on the last day of the Knesset session.”

Lost under the rubble of the Beit El demolitions was a story that would have dominated headlines otherwise: a reported Israeli strike in Syria that killed three people. The papers have a field day trying to swim through all the various foreign reports about who was killed – including an initial report that counted arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar among the dead.

Yedioth reports that while the people in a targeted car on the Syrian Golan were under the command of Kuntar, who served years in Israeli prison for an attack that left four people dead in 1979, he was not killed.

“The killed were Kuntar’s men, who were planning on putting down terror infrastructure on the Israel-Syria border. The men who were killed planned an attack on IDF soldiers on the [border] fence,” the paper reports.

Haaretz reports what pretty much everybody guessed already, that US Jews are not united in opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran, though the broadsheet puts the claim in the mouth of Israel’s consul general in Philadelphia, Yaron Sideman.

“At this crucial point of the Iranian issue – which for years has been at the core of Israeli foreign policy and was described countless times by the Israeli leadership as an existential threat – the Jewish community in the United States is not standing as a united front behind Israel and important parts of it are on the fence,” he’s quoted saying in a telegram obtained by the paper.