Will more guns make a difference for Israelis?

Israeli media wade into the gun control issue raging in the United States after the IDF chief of staff orders all on-leave soldiers to be released home with their firearms.

The announcement of the change in policy came in reaction to the murder of an IDF soldier who was out shopping with his wife and child at a West Bank settlement supermarket a week earlier.

Sgt. Tuvia Yanai Weissman’s family pointed out that their son had repeatedly asked to be dispatched on leave with his rifle, but that his requests were rejected because of army policy. The IDF issued an order a decade ago forbidding combat soldiers from taking their weapons home while on leave longer than three days in order to prevent weapon theft.

The tabloids — Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth — throw their support behind the decision and devote their top stories to the issue.

Yedioth Ahronoth’s front page dispenses with hard reporting, opting instead for an op-ed by Yossi Yehoshua, who makes an argument similar to that of some proponents of the Second Amendment in the United States who say armed civilians could prevent mass shootings by stopping would-be attackers.

While Weissman’s life might not have been saved had he been sent home with his service weapon for a week of leave, his death, and the subsequent decision to require soldiers to carry their rifles while off-duty, “will save lives of other soldiers and civilians,” Yehoshua says.

He calls Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot’s decision to permit soldiers on leave, even if it’s longer than three days, to take their weapons home “the right and appropriate step.”

“What’s not clear is how this necessary instruction didn’t occur before,” he says. “Why does the army need to reach the point where a soldier is murdered in order to change the order?”

“But at a time like this, when terrorism sweeps the streets, it’s hard to understand why the order wasn’t canceled, despite all its virtues, in order to allow more soldiers to protect civilians while they’re on leave as well,” Yehoshua says.

Haim Shine likewise crows in support of more armed soldiers on the streets, going so far as to say that “it’s very likely that had Yanai been armed with his personal weapon, the outcome of the encounter between him and the terrorists would have been completely different.” He calls the change in policy “essential and necessary” in light of the past several months of regular terrorist attacks, chiding the IDF for it being “a little too late.”

Haaretz finds the matter less pressing, devoting a few inches on Page 5 to the order to allow combat soldiers to return home with their weapons. But while the tabloids cite gun thefts as the reason why the IDF tightened its policy, Haaretz says it stemmed from the “significant use of firearms by soldiers who committed suicide.” An IDF study found that after the change in policy, suicides by soldiers dropped 40%, the paper reports.

Both Haaretz and Israel Hayom run front-page exclusives — one about an investigation into alleged corruption to the tune of tens of millions of shekels, the other on heart disease.

Haaretz reports on an unpublished investigation put together by the state comptroller into how associates of Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel siphoned funds allocated to development of Israel’s peripheral communities to religious organizations they were affiliated with. The comptroller investigated how Ariel’s cronies presented themselves as his aides, even though they had no official standing, and funneled tens of millions of shekels to religious Zionist groups.

Israel Hayom, for its part, reports on the Health Ministry’s decision to start carrying out a survey on heart disease across the country, the first of its kind in 20 years in Israel. The crux of the issue under discussion is that the findings of the study will only be published as a general overview of the 5,000 heart surgeries per year, not on a case by case basis.

Haaretz also reports on a bill which it says, with no small amount of consternation, would seek to increase the role of Judaism and Jewish law in the country’s judiciary. According to the paper, a Jewish Home party lawmaker has promoted the legislation to set up a governmental institution which would provide judges with interpretations of Jewish religious judicial literature so judges could avail themselves of the Jewish interpretation of a given issue.

Needless to say, the bastion of secular Zionism’s hackles are more than simply raised.

The closest thing to such outrage that can be found in Yedioth Ahronoth is the paper’s disgust with unofficially published posters put up on the London Underground denouncing Israel, which the paper calls “the train of incitement.” Yedioth Ahronoth says that the BDS activists never expected that their actions would spark a pissing contest between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid about which of them was the hero who took care of the matter, but the two politicians went at it, with the former finance minister positioning himself once against as the “alternative foreign minister” to Netanyahu.

The fact that the posters were promptly taken down and denounced by London authorities expectedly takes second fiddle.