The truth and nothing but the truth

It’s been a couple of millennia since a guy in these parts famously told his followers that the truth would set them free, but if the events of Tuesday, borne out in Wednesday’s paper, are any indication, the sentiment is alive and well in the Israel of 2016.

Dominating the news hole of the Hebrew print press are stories about a search for truth, sometimes futile and sometimes with a pinprick of light shining through at the end of the tunnel.

First among those is the maybe possibly final end to the mystery of the Yemenite children affair, in which it’s alleged that Israel kidnapped and shipped off hundreds of babies born to immigrant parents, accompanied by a search for truth that has given rise to accusations of a more recent vintage of possible criminal activities by lawmakers and finally a probe into the mistaken killing of a Palestinian teen by Israeli troops.

The Yemenite children affair leads both the Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom tabloids, the former crowing that the truth will finally come out, and the latter giving credit for the long-awaited healing of festering wounds to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In Yedioth, though, it’s not Netanyahu but the public who finally pushed lawmakers to call for sealed papers revealing the true fates of the children who disappeared to come out. And while the paper quotes a senior judicial official saying “the train is already rolling” (i.e., this is really happening), it also notes that how quickly the truth comes out, if it ever truly does, will depend on how fast minister Tzachi Hanegbi can read.

“Yesterday it became clear that in the next couple of months Hanegbi will need to deal with reading more than 1.5 million documents connected to the affair, upon which to base his recommendation to the government [on whether to open the files],” the paper writes. “The senior judicial source said yesterday that since the publication of the documents can’t harm foreign relations and has no bearing on national security, the main things he will have to take into account are the public interest in publishing it [as well as] the need to redact any personal information revealing the names of children, or where they were sent, in order to protect their privacy.”

Behind all these cold facts, though, are actual families torn apart, a fact not lost on Yedioth columnist Tamar Kaplinsky.

“Many people speak about the state and the closed archives and on the troubling silence over this tragedy – and all I can think about is the warmth of a baby pressed against your body,” she writes. “About the damp smoothness of a newborn, when its whole body is open and its belly is soft and big and empty.”

While Israel Hayom’s coverage skews heavily toward Netanyahu’s role in getting the documents released, the paper also includes a column by MK Nava Boker, who writes about her personal experiences of a brother and sister who may have been disappeared as part of the affair and the questions that still gnaw at her and her family.

“My older brother was buried when he was 11 months old, after he got sick and died, but about a decade ago we discovered that he doesn’t have one grave but two with the name Zion Jarafi in the Pardes Hanna cemetery – a fact that raises questions with no answers until now,” she writes. “Recently the family wound was reopened, and again it bleeds and hurts. After years of pushing this aside I find myself wondering if my sister and maybe even my brother are here in this world and I know them. Maybe they live right next door? Many times when I’ve gone down the street I’ve asked myself, is it possible that the woman passing in front of me right now is my sister?”

Haaretz has the Yemen affair on its front page, but well below coverage of another affair that lawmakers are likely less keen on seeing come out into the open: a secret police document detailing investigations into possible criminal activities of all 120 Knesset members.

In a column, Yaniv Kubovich writes that the secret dossier could be as damaging/influential as the Winograd Report, a famous probe into failures during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, and waxes poetic about its importance, even if it was buried for fear that it could be used for political witch hunts.

“Public representatives who steal, defraud or take bribes need to fear the day that [the police] will come to them as well,” he writes. “This is an important warning for a country fighting public corruption.”

A fight just as important, many would say, is that against terror, or Palestinian violence, or whatever impossibly loaded term you, dear reader, choose to employ. But just like the battle against corruption, a seemingly black and white issue became hopelessly tangled up Tuesday with the killing of an innocent Palestinian teen by IDF troops searching for perpetrators of a rock-throwing attack on a major West Bank highway.

Yedioth Ahronoth calls the shooting “unfortunate” and reports that an investigation has been launched. But what seems straightforward in the populist tabloid is anything but in lefty Haaretz and righty Israel Hayom, each of which play up different sides of the incident.

While Israel Hayom runs with the headline of the 15-year-old shot and killed, it is swift to highlight the Israeli Foreign Ministry response, which held the Palestinians fully responsible for the death, seeing as they incited the rock attack which forced the army to shoot an innocent teen. Even more than that, the tabloid goes ahead and quotes Likud MK Oren Hazan who baselessly questions whether Mahmoud Badran, returning home from a night swim, was all that innocent.

“Terror you liquidate,” the paper quotes Hazan saying during an argument with Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi. “We need to check if this youth took part in the attack. If it turns out he took part, then it seems he got what was coming to him, but let’s not play stupid. He was in the area of terrorists and with terrorists you don’t speak, you assassinate. Terrorists get a bullet in the head.”

Haaretz, meanwhile, highlights the boy’s father’s testimony that he was innocent and had nothing to do with anything, not that the paper thinks the army will come to the same conclusion.

“This was a shooting without any reason carried out in order to kill, and I demand this incident be brought to the International Criminal Court in The Hague,” he’s quoted saying.