Two funerals and a wedding with Africa

Monday’s Hebrew newspapers are a tale of two funerals, one held in New York, the other in Jerusalem — the two capitals of the Jewish world. The first was a memorial to a Holocaust survivor, a Nobel Prize winner, a man considered for the Israeli presidency, and a champion of the Jewish state and its right to exist. The second was a rabbi, a father of 10, and a righteous, loving man by all accounts, who was murdered in a terrorist attack in the West Bank last week.

One would expect that Elie Wiesel, a man whose accolades and accomplishments can’t be overstated, would be the front page story. Instead, his private funeral in New York is relegated to the back pages. The memorial to Rabbi Miki Marks, attended by thousands in the emerging Israeli custom, gets the limelight.

The obligatory tearful scenes and the almost stock heart-rending quotes from the mourners color the front pages of all three papers, but equally important to the press is the government’s response to Mark’s and other terror victims’ deaths.

Yedioth Ahronoth plays up Facebook’s role in inciting Palestinian violence, and reports that despite Israeli ministers pushing for the social media site to crack down on such content — going so far as to charge that it has blood on its hands and threaten to shut it down in areas of the country — the company dismissed the threats and said it works to prevent the dissemination of such content.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman gave the green light to the construction of 800 housing units in East Jerusalem and Maale Adumim, and “to sweeten the pill” approved construction of 600 units in the capital’s Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Safafa, Haaretz quotes an Israeli official saying. It juxtaposes the announcement of the construction in East Jerusalem with the funeral of Rabbi Mark, and reports that Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting that the government would respond to the recent rash of terror attacks by providing funds for the strengthening of West Bank settlements. Haaretz doesn’t explicitly say that the West Bank construction plans are a direct response to the recent terror attacks, including the one that killed Mark.

In Israel Hayom’s book, the connection couldn’t be clearer. “The response to terror attacks: Construction in Maale Adumim and Jerusalem,” reads its headline. Unlike the other two major dailies, Israel Hayom leads its coverage with the emotional instead of the substantive, placing Mark’s funeral and the loss of a security guard’s eye in last Thursday’s terror attack in Kiryat Arba over other major stories worldwide. Even Netanyahu’s imminent diplomatic excursion around Africa and commemoration of the 1976 raid on Entebbe don’t get as much attention. (For instance, the Islamic State bombings in Baghdad that claimed the lives of over 125 people, and which made front page headlines in Haaretz, get stuck on Page 26 in Israel Hayom and Page 24 in Yedioth Ahronoth.)

But the main story in Yedioth Ahronoth addresses the still-burning issue of the four Israelis held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip (yes, four, even though the papers only show the photos of Hadar Goldin, Oron Shaul and Avraham Mengitsu). The paper reports that while the families of those three protest outside the border crossing with the Gaza Strip, Israel is conducting secret negotiations with Hamas to secure their release. For the time being, the haggling hasn’t gotten anywhere, the paper reports. A senior Israeli official says that “Hamas wants a second Gilad Shalit deal with the release of thousands of prisoners.”

But that’s not all, the report says: Hamas wants the release of 50 of its members arrested in the wake of the murders of three Israeli teens before the outbreak of Operation Protective Edge as a precondition to indirect talks, the official confirmed.

Israel rejects preconditions and refuses to release the 50, who were held in Israeli prison and released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap in 2011, and arrested again in 2014. Israel is willing, however, to sweeten the pot for Hamas by easing conditions for 1,500 Hamas prisoners as a sign of goodwill, Yedioth Ahronoth reports.

Netanyahu’s departure for Uganda and a handful of other African countries is the subject of debate in the papers, with Haaretz calling it the prime minister’s Entebbe test — alluding to the operation to liberate kidnapped Israelis in Uganda 40 years ago in which his brother was killed. The paper offers rare praise for the “desirable and necessary” diplomatic gesture to strengthen ties with Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya and Ethiopia.

“It’s good that despite the security situation — and in Israel a delicate security situation is almost a permanent fixture — the trip will take place as planned,” the paper’s editorial says. On the other hand, it argues, Netanyahu’s “emotional involvement” makes it “hard to shake off the impression that the entire trip would not be taking place were it not for Netanyahu’s desire to take advantage of his official position in order to conduct a ceremony in the old Entebbe airport.”

“Netanyahu’s test today in Entebbe is whether he will be able to rise to the occasion, to grant the proper respect to the commanders and planners of the operation, rather than focus only on his brother, and to refrain from making political capital from his family connection to the operation.”

Whereas Haaretz notes that relations with African states aren’t yet restored to where they were in the heyday of the 1960s, Israel Hayom’s Boaz Bismuth says they already are. He points to the economic boom in Africa as part of the reason for Netanyahu’s trip.

“Africa of today is much quieter and peaceful than it was a decade ago,” he says, before reconsidering. “While states like Somalia, South Sudan and the Central African Republic are in a state of chaos, and Burundi returned to fighting, these states aren’t representative of the whole.”

Think about that argument for a second.

The bottom line for Bismuth is that Africa is 54 countries with 54 votes in the UN and international bodies and 54 economies. What he neglects to mention is that of those, more than one in five — Algeria, Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Guinea, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan, and Tunisia — don’t have relations with Israel.