The year of driving dangerously

It’s the external dangers that usually get the headlines in the Israeli press: the Irans, Islamic States, intifadas and anti-Semites. But sometimes the biggest bogeyman is no more foreign than a big green bus that barrels through your neighborhood every day.

A stark reminder of that came Sunday with the deaths of three people on roads around the country in the course of six hours, leaving families bereaved like thousands of others, not by bullets or missiles or knives but rather by a split second when everything went wrong.

While the day was bloodier than many others, it’s the death of a 10-year-old boy hit by a bus as he rode his bike in Jerusalem that seems to make the story lead material for both tabloids Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom, who bemoan the “black day” and “bloody day” respectively.

Though Yedioth Ahronoth has been involved for several months in a campaign of raising awareness about traffic safety – mostly using the driver’s ed method of tales of carnage as a deterrent – this time it’s Israel Hayom with the more striking front page treatment: the word “Enough!” emblazoned in the same big yellow and black it used a day earlier to broadcast immediate danger for Israelis in Turkey, this time atop a picture of a mangled bicycle.

Yet the tabloid plays the story on page 11, behind pieces on supposed Palestinian incitement, supposed Israeli incitement, and a possibly rapist general, demonstrating the truth of the age-old adage, “If it bleeds and is terror related, it leads.”

Yedioth, though, does actually give the road deaths top real estate, with the heart-rending headline “Last smile” and a big picture of 10-year-old Shimon Abromov doing just that. The paper reports that Abromov was riding on the handlebars without a helmet with his older brother Eliyahu pedaling when they suddenly saw a bus.

“Eliyahu braked, and as a result of the braking, Shimon flew off the bike and rolled under the bus’s wheels,” the paper reports, adding that he is the 27th child to be killed while riding a bike since 2008, though it doesn’t define what “child” means for that stat.

The paper also reports on a fatal accident hours later at Golani Junction in the north of the country, and a hit and run in Ashdod Sunday night that left a 76-year-old woman dead, the 88th road fatality this year.

Yossi Farkush, a fireman who lost a daughter in a bus crash he himself responded to, writes in a column for the paper that if drivers are not going to heed traffic laws, it’s up to authorities to up punishments until they do.

“If they catch a driver on the phone, it’s not enough to fine him NIS 1,000 — they need to fine him NIS 20,000. Especially drivers of public transportation vehicles, like those who drive students, soldiers and civilians. The fines and punishments today are not deterring enough. And if that’s the case, maybe they need to put wayward drivers in jail. Only by upping enforcement and making punishments more severe will we be able to save lives.”

In Israel Hayom, the head of traffic safety group Or Yarok is quoted saying that the issue is lack of resources to have people out there enforcing the laws and keeping the roads safe.

“Almost every day someone is killed on the roads,” Shmuel Abuov is quoted saying. “The Transportation Ministry needs to take care of these [blood]-red roads and to return the NIS 200 million it cut to quickly buy cruisers for the traffic police.”

The road deaths don’t make the front page of Haaretz, but its top story deals with what it seems to see as too much enforcement, in this case against building in an Arab neighborhood in Jerusalem, which the paper says is being secretly stopped on order of the government.

The paper bases its claim on a cryptic statement made by a state attorney at a hearing last week over a plot of land in Beit Safafa, when the court probed why a plan for adjacent Jewish-owned property was given the go-ahead but not for the Arab one.

“A lawyer representing the state informed the court on Thursday that a secret high-level Israeli political decision was the reason. The prosecutor offered to provide the court further information on the decision, but said it should be deemed ‘top secret,’” the paper reports.

This tale of government interference makes for a strange bedfellow with another story offering Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu begrudging praise for “at least not interfering,” in noting the ebbing of Palestinian attacks on Israelis over the past several weeks.

“If the present wave of violence is indeed fading, the prime minister does get some of the credit. At least he didn’t interfere with the IDF and the Shin Bet, nor was he swept into making unilateral moves that might have caused damage that would have been difficult to repair,” writes analyst Amos Harel at the end of a lengthy screed on why Netanyahu really doesn’t deserve much credit, and certainly not as much as he claims.

In Israel Hayom, which is normally not shy about heaping praise on Netanyahu, the prime minister’s name is conspicuously absent from a Dan Margalit column praising certain leaders for managing the fight against terror and internal political battles.

“If Israel acted more forcefully against the terror of the knives, it would be met by more hostility from the world and suffer worse condemnations,” he writes. “The patience shown by [Defense Minister] Moshe Ya’alon and [IDF chiefs of staff] Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot from Operation Protective Edge until now has been shown to be better than any alternative suggested by [Education Minister] Naftali Bennett or Avigdor Liberman, and several ministers and Knesset members from Likud,” he writes.

Netanyahu does feature prominently in a fun little piece of gotcha reporting from Yedioth, which writes that despite the prime minister bashing MK Zouheir Bahloul for daring to say attacks on soldiers are not terror, a book by the prime minister from 1986 shows him saying something pretty similar.

The paper reports that in the English version of “Terrorism: How the West Can win,” Netanyahu defines terrorists as those who attack weak and defenseless civilians, in fact “anyone outside of soldiers.”

However, when someone pointed out that his definition could be used to de-terror Hezbollah and Fatah, he quickly tried to clarify himself, the report notes:

“Netanyahu, who seemingly understood the problem, asked to fix the definition and in the foreword of the Hebrew version wrote: ‘The book does not say, of course, that terrorists attack only civilians, but civilians are their main targets. That’s who they mostly want to hurt. Also when they attack soldiers they are trying, at the base of the matter, to turn their attacks on civilians.’”