Time to change the underwear

‘The coalition is dead, long live elections,” Israel’s Hebrew papers seem to cry out Wednesday morning, as the dust settles on the first salvo of finger-pointing ahead of the dissolution of the Knesset.

From Yedioth Ahronoth’s main headline, “The election begins,” to Israel Hayom’s checklist of who’s been fired, who’s quitting and who’s doing the firing, to Haaretz’s gaggle of pundits waxing poetic on the situation, surrounded by a pointless Page 1 cartoon depicting politicians in an election box, all three papers seem pretty excited to see the return of The Greatest Show of Democracy on Earth.

While there was certainly no shortage of news on Tuesday — with the coalition implosion being topped off by Netanyahu’s firing of Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, effectively booting their respective Yesh Atid and Hatnua parties from the government — papers seems more concerned with playing up their various analyses, opinions, rants, diatribes, kvetchfests, tirades and the like.

Haaretz takes the cake in this category, with eight front page commentaries on the coming of new elections (doubling up on Yedioth’s and Israel Hayom’s four each), most of them giddily heralding the prospect of seeing Netanyahu booted from office, a goal the paper has made no effort to hide.

Kicking things off for the broadsheet is editor Aluf Benn, who writes that while many will run, the vote is really a referendum on one B. Netanyahu and whether his reign should continue, though he has doubts over whether anyone can oust him from the Prime Minister’s Office.

Next door, the paper’s main political analyst Yossi Verter apparently cribbed a look at his boss’s notes, because he has basically the same thesis about it being a referendum on Netanyahu, though he’s less bullish on Bibi’s chances at the polls. “He has a problem: He has no banner to wave in this campaign. Iran will soon be nuclear. Hamas wasn’t defeated. The economy, as he himself admitted Tuesday, is in a bad shape, ‘due to Lapid.’ Terror has resumed – and in Jerusalem, our united capital, of all places. Europe is turning against us, relations with the American president are at a nadir and the ‘peace process’ is a bad joke, even if that’s not solely his fault.”

In Yedioth, Nahum Barnea sees Netanyahu as blaming the electorate for the need for a new vote for not giving him enough power, which Barnea compares to a dancer blaming the floor when he falls. Plus, the prime minister knows that the people don’t really want new elections, since there is no chance of anything changing.

“Like the old British army joke: The good news is you can change your underwear today. The bad news is, you’ll have to trade it with the person next to you,” he writes.

Doing its best David Foster Wallace impression, the paper also includes an annotated transcript of Netanyahu’s Tuesday night speech in which he announced the need for new elections. Below Netanyahu’s quote accusing Livni and Lapid of trying to push him out, a footnote expounds that “Netanyahu opened with a sharp attack on Livni and Lapid and accused them of a putsch, but did not provide information to explain the accusations of a seeming collective bid of the two against him.”

In Israel Hayom, Dan Margalit writes that the big problem from the start may have been the structure of the coalition, which was doomed to fail:

“Regarding the tumult, Netanyahu and [Jewish Home leader Naftali] Bennett are now explaining — and soon Lapid too – that the coalition partnership was structurally problematic. True, because of the makeup – mostly Zionist elements – they did not understand that their first and main job was to find compromise acceptable to all of them, or to reject doubts, instead of highlighting the differences between them. None of them were imbued with a sense of purpose and the experiment failed in such a short time that any responsible citizen is left shrouded in a feeling of failure.”

While Margalit assigns blame equally to all the actors, Israel Hayom’s Haim Schein pens a paean to Netanyahu, whose move to elections, he claims, proves the depth of his pluck.

“Netanyahu proved last night that there are times in public life that demand courage, and not just in battle. There are times in the life of a nation that a leader needs to look directly at the people, take a necessarily personal risk, and begin leading a march of the largest camp to correcting the values of the State of Israel. A government whose ministers’ propensity for subversion is in direct disproportion to their abilities is not able to work. A government in which the ‘I’ of the ministers rules over their public responsibilities loses the right to exist.”

Get out the vote (and your wallet)

Some might call it pluck, others may call it egotistical, but everybody agrees it will be expensive, like Yedioth, which reports that the return to the polls will cost some NIS 2 billion, or about $500 million.

The paper writes that the Finance Ministry estimate is made up of the NIS 500 million direct cost of campaigning and setting up the election infrastructure, and another NIS 1.5 billion lost to the economy in the day off needed to run the election, plus whatever costs the delay in passing a new budget will cause.

For that kind of gelt, Yedioth reports, the government could put a whole slew of gifts under the Hanukkah bush, like an extra NIS 500 a month for Holocaust survivors, hospitals could get another 10,000 beds, 1,000 more classrooms for children and shelter rooms for destitute elderly could be built, and the army could get hundreds more APCs.

While recent polls show Netanyahu and other right-wing parties gaining in new elections, Haaretz reports that Arab parties, in danger of nearly dropping off the map, are considering joining forces to become politically relevant in the next round of voting. The paper reports that the bid is being led by Balad, which believes it can garner 14 or 15 seats in a joint effort, well above the three or four each of the three parties has now. The party apparently has Ra’am-Ta’al aboard, but is still trying to convince the Jewish-Arab Communist Hadash faction, which doesn’t see itself fitting the rubric.

“Hadash is not an Arab party and there is no reason for it to unite with the two Arab parties,” a Greek chorus of party sources is quoted telling the paper. “Hadash is a Jewish-Arab party that demonstrates that coexistence is still possible, especially in light of the events of this past summer.”