Hebrew media review

Trump-Abbas enthusiasm has press putting on peace goggles

While papers are quick to note that the White House meeting was much ado about nothing, they can’t help broadcasting the rosy assessments that a deal is just around the corner

Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor

US President Donald Trump (right) giving a joint statement with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, May 3, 2017. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images via JTA)
US President Donald Trump (right) giving a joint statement with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, May 3, 2017. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images via JTA)

Ever the showman, US President Donald Trump’s first meeting with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was as upbeat and full of possibly unjustified excitement as a late-night infomercial for a slicing, dicing appliance, and the display of enthusiasm for restarting a peace process seemingly infects Israeli correspondents and pundits alike.

Despite the fact that the Yedioth Ahronoth paper goes out of its way to note that Trump did not mention the two-state solution and calls his pronouncements “grandiose” and without much detail, the paper leads off its story on the meeting by amalgamating a mishmash of Trump quotes that excitedly broadcasts his readiness to get the ball rolling.

“I’ve spoken to Bibi Netanyahu and other leaders. I will do everything to achieve a peace deal between the Israel and the Palestinians. I am prepared to be a mediator, an arbitrator and a facilitator of the process. Peace will not be imposed on the sides by another country,” the paper misquotes him saying, displaying Israeli journalists’ propensity for collating comments into a paraphrase that they present as a direct quote.

Haaretz’s top headline proves you don’t need to make things up to show how gosh-darn optimistic the comments were, accurately quoting Trump saying “We’ll start a process which hopefully will lead to peace.”

But the paper’s front page, dispensing with news and diving straight into analysis, has correspondent Barak Ravid opining that nothing much new was said.

Analyst Chemi Shalev, meanwhile takes close note of Abbas’s brown-nosing toward Trump, which he says just may work on the US president.

“The new but not-so-secret weapon of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian leadership is flattery. Pure, unadulterated, unrestrained, unvarnished blarney. Whether this is a result of psychological profiling and detailed staff work or simply the gut instincts of experienced old hands, the Palestinians have come to the conclusion that the way to win Donald Trump’s heart is to sing his praises as if there’s no tomorrow, with hardly a thought about the lack of any connection between their adulation and reality,” he writes, adding that it’s not a bad play given that Trump is a “decidedly narcissistic leader who is blind to his well-known deficiencies as he exponentially inflates his less recognizable strengths.”

Yedioth also notes that officials in Jerusalem said they came away from watching the meeting satisfied, and it’s little wonder given the top headline of Israel Hayom, which plays up Trump expressing concern to Abbas about salaries paid to families of terrorists in Israeli prisons.

The paper’s headline “Tough deal? Let’s prove them wrong” also broadcasts the same infectious enthusiasm for the prospects of a deal. In all, though, the paper, much like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, doesn’t dwell too much on the meeting, clearly cognizant of the pitfalls of praising Abbas or criticizing Trump.

Yedioth doesn’t have the same pressures, but the paper also doesn’t spill an excess of ink over the meeting. In fact, its front page is mostly taken up not with the Trump-Abbas summit, but rather a report that German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier refused a request from Netanyahu’s office to promise not to meet with Breaking the Silence, previewing another possible showdown with Berlin over the matter, after the prime minister canceled a meeting with the German foreign minister last week over a meeting with the same group.

However, the paper notes that it seems Steinmeier is likely to be the bigger man and make Netanyahu uber alles to keep things from getting out of hand.

New elected German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier smiles after the presidential election at the Bundesversammlung federal assembly Bundestag (lower house of parliament)on February 12, 2017 in Berlin. (AFP PHOTO / Odd ANDERSEN)
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier smiles after the presidential election at the Bundesversammlung federal assembly Bundestag (lower house of parliament)on February 12, 2017 in Berlin. (AFP PHOTO / Odd ANDERSEN)

“Diplomatic sources believe that Steinmeier will show the needed sensitivity and not meet with them in the end, knowing that it would mean an open and bitter diplomatic crisis with Israel — something that Steinmeier, a veteran diplomat, will surely want to avoid,” the paper reports.

Haaretz focuses on another blackballing of a European, in this case a Dutch journalist who is being deported. While the Government Press Office says the issue is a technical problem with his visa, the paper surmises it may have something to do with the journalist’s critical reporting on Israel and the territories.

Reporting on escalating agitation between the GPO and Derk Walters of NRC starting with an article in which he claimed that Israel was planting weapons next to Palestinian attackers in Hebron, including diplomatic intervention needed to get him a press card, the paper diligently transcribes the GPO’s claims that his deportation has nothing to do with his reporting. However its smoking gun is a passage in an email accidentally sent to Walters in which a GPO official talks about options for how to deal with the Dutch journalist, which “included references to making the other side sweat and leaving all options on the table including a U-turn, and letting the Foreign Ministry get involved.”

The broadsheet goes even further in alleging that the government is silencing dissent in a lead editorial titled “The Government Deportation Office.”

“Israel is persisting in its race to isolate itself from the properly-run world – this time by persecuting foreign journalists who criticize the government’s policy,” the paper writes.

The government having a combative relationship with the press is nothing new, but if there is one place those ties are not frayed it’s Israel Hayom, owned by Netanyahu backer Sheldon Adelson, which is often seen as a mouthpiece for the prime minister.

It’s little surprise then that an op-ed by Ariel Bolstein in the paper on the UNESCO decision that called Israel an occupier in Jerusalem dovetails nicely with the fuming anger coming out of Netanyahu’s office.

Israel's ambassador to UNESCO Carmel Shama-Hacohen throws a copy of the day's resolution on Jerusalem in the trash on Wednesday, October 26, 2016. (Erez Lichtfeld)
Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO Carmel Shama-Hacohen throws a copy of the day’s resolution on Jerusalem in the trash on Wednesday, October 26, 2016. (Erez Lichtfeld)

Alongside a cartoon that strangely shows a UNESCO decision being thrown in a garbage can shaped like the UNESCO logo (which is both not clever and was actually done, months ago, by envoy Carmel Shama-Hacohen) Bolstein writes that it really doesn’t matter what those goobers at UNESCO think, ignoring the obvious contradiction in spilling yet more ink over the supposedly meaningless organization.

“We will try to explain [our connection] to every visitor at its gates, but we will try even more to act as owners — to deepen our hold on all parts of the city and to erase any doubt as to its future, whether it comes from a futile, impractical and unimportant international body or anywhere else,” he writes. “We returned to the cistern, to the market and the square, and nobody can stop the historic return of the Jewish nation to its land.”

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