Which hunt

When an animal (or a person) is cornered, the natural reaction is to lash out in all directions, to try and find a way out. In Israel’s Sunday morning papers, that animal was Iran, being pushed into a dangerous corner by the US’s possible abandonment of the nuclear deal. But now that pundits have had their fill of weighing in on the joys and pitfalls of the deal’s possible demise, they fully turn their attention Monday to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his attack on the police for leaking information about corruption investigations into him.

For those exasperated by what they see as a prime minister targeting anyone he can in response to the graft allegations, Haaretz lays it out most succinctly.

“Senior law enforcement officials identify evidence of criminality and Netanyahu launches an attack,” the paper’s top headline reads. “After breaking with the state comptroller and becoming angry with the attorney general, now it’s [police chief Roni] Alsheich’s turn. Even [state prosecutor] Shai Nitzan, who has taken a hard line on Case 1000, could be in his sights,” the subheadline adds, referring to one of two corruption cases against the prime minister.

Reporter Gidi Weitz details in the small print that Alsheich had predicted to him that he would be the prime minister’s next target, and goes through all the other times Netanyahu has gone after those officials he himself had chosen once they sided with the rule of law over him.

“As the weeks pass and the police’s recommendations to indict Netanyahu draw nearer in two cases, it is reasonable to assume that the violent attacks on Alsheich and his investigators will escalate – whether personally by Netanyahu or through his followers, Likud lawmakers David Bitan and David Amsalem,” Weitz writes.

The same idea of “this is just the beginning” is in Yossi Verter’s commentary in the same paper, under the headline “Hunting season has begun.”

“Anyone who touches the hot potato known as the Netanyahu investigations will be dealt with personally by the chief hunter and his docile troop in the cabinet and Knesset. This gang’s ammo pack has enough mud for everyone,” he writes.

The idea is also clear in Israel Hayom, which is mostly seen as representing Netanyahu’s worldview, though the paper would disagree with the claim that the prime minister’s hunt for police leakers, which has now been taken up by Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, is about anything but holding up the law.

“Stop the leaks,” screams a large headline on the paper’s front page, accompanied by a Haim Shine column in which he claims the police are undermining public trust by leaking information, and the coppers are the ones with a political bent (as if politicians, including Netanyahu, don’t use leaks every day to control the flow of information, and as if his paper isn’t normally happy to go along with protecting government sources who are never willing to put their names behind anything, even lying to their readers about where the information came from).

“I’ve been following police investigations for years and have never seen such behavior from the media and investigative bodies as I’m seeing in the probes into the prime minister and his wife,” Shine writes. “Many citizens are convinced, with strong backing in my opinion, that this is a political media witch hunt whose goal is to bring down the prime minister and bring about regime change without a single vote taking place.”

Meanwhile, in a sign that Netanyahu’s first target, Alsheich police media strategist Lior Horev, is still not off the hook, Israel Hayom’s Akiva Bigman pens an attack on the latter as a political hack who has turned Alsheich against Netanyahu.

“The police chief began a process of healing ties with the media correctly by strengthening the public information system and cutting off problematic contacts between police official and the media. But as time has passed it seems the results have become even worse than they were. Instead of sub-chiefs, the police chief himself is in contact with journalists, and instead of a professional public information apparatus, the person acting as a middleman between him and the public is a political strategist. If he has the good of the public in mind, Alsheich would do well to either suspend himself or quit.”

In Yedioth Ahronoth, meanwhile, commentator Sima Kadmon writes that the only media strategist who has a problem is Netanyahu’s, who got him in this hole.

“A serious adviser would not have let Netanyahu turn to settling personal scores with people who have no public cachet … but this is what happens when your wife and your son are your advisers,” she writes, adding that it seems even Netanyahu realized his mistake, hence his turn Sunday to attacking the new public broadcaster reprising a battle that had long been forgotten.

Attacking those you think are going after you is one way to try and take care of a problem. Another way is just to legislate the problem out of existence. Yedioth Ahronoth, which was the only paper to actually play up the police-Netanyahu kerfuffle a day earlier, now reports that Likud is trying to push a law making the prime minister immune to prosecution. While the law would not apply in this term, the paper notes that if it should somehow pass, Netanyahu would call snap elections so he could be sheltered under its downy protective wings.

Unfortunately for him, though, the paper sees the legislation as having less of a chance than a snowflake in July.

“It’s chances of becoming law are slim. Even if the attorney general can’t stop it, his opposition will make it hard for the government to pass it,” the paper reports. “Even if it somehow passes that Ministerial Committee for Legislation, it won’t pass the Knesset.”