Won’t you be my deputy: 9 things to know for January 31

1. Yesh Resilience rising: Polls taken in the immediate aftermath of Benny Gantz’s campaign-launching stump speech show big problems for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud.

• Firstly, the polls show that should Benny Gantz team up with Yesh Atid, another centrist party, the alliance would overtake Likud by several seats.
• And though Israel no longer has direct elections for prime minister, the “suitability for prime minister” question on many polls is seen as a key indicator. In the last two elections, nobody came close to Netanyahu.
• According to Hadashot, Gantz is now neck and neck with the prime minister.

2. Polls schmolls: While there is plenty of hype — the polls make up the top stories of two of the country’s largest print publications — there are many reasons to tamp down expectations, as even Gantz’s Israel Resilience party did with its parvenu reaction.

• Firstly, there’s the unreliability of polls in general. Snap polls like this are performed almost exclusively online or through text messaging, the least reliable way to poll, making them even less trustworthy.
• And one need not forget Israeli pollsters’ inability to predict Likud’s victory in 2015, even after the votes were cast. Most campaigns have barely begun.
• But the biggest issue is the fact that the polls were taken in the immediate aftermath of Gantz’s speech, with excitement around him at an all-time high and his face a constant fixture on the news.
• Yedioth Ahronoth’s Yuval Karni notes that after Avi Gabbay won the Labor leadership, polls had him getting 20 seats. Now he’s barely polling at 6.
• In the same paper columnist Shimon Shiffer urges an “abundance of caution around the polls, especially those published right as new people enter the race.”
• “One has to wait a week or two in order to see if the polls were a launching pad or the glass ceiling,” Haaretz’s Yossi Verter cautions, even as he uses the polls to note that alarmists in Likud have now been proven correct.

3. Team up or go to war: The polls may look good for Gantz, but it will mean finding a way to join up with Lapid and others, which may be easier said than done. According to reports, both Gantz and Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid would rather watch Israel burn than play second fiddle (in not so many words).

• Pro-Likud Israel Hayom, which has led attacks on Gantz, quotes sources within Yesh Atid vowing to destroy the former general if he doesn’t join Yesh Atid, with Yair Lapid as leader.
• “If he decides in the end not to join Yesh Atid, Lapid will make sure to politically assassinate him,” a party source threatens. Yesh Atid’s MK Ofer Shelah later tells Army Radio the “source” does not exist, and that the story is untrue.
• Yedioth’s Sima Kadmon thinks that there’s a better chance of the “gentlemanly” Lapid folding, though he’s made no sign he’ll do so: “There’s still three weeks until the tickets have to be finalized. That’s a lifetime in Israel right now.”

4. Wondering Jews: Another question the polls attempt to game is whether Likud’s efforts to paint Gantz as a leftist have succeeded, and where people think he stands on the political spectrum.

• Tellingly, polls by both Channel 12 and Channel 13 news show that the characterization has mostly failed to take hold, with only around 20 percent buying it.
• But voters also don’t know what to think about Gantz. Both polls show between 28 and 30 percent either thinking he is neither right or left or not knowing at all.
• Some have mentioned that Gantz’s speech actually placed him with the right-leaning mainstream, and columns in Israel Hayom portray him as a polished but inexperienced puppet of slick spin doctors, perhaps signaling the next attack campaign.
• “He promised to solve all the problems of Israeli society,” columnist Yaakov Meir writes in the paper. “He didn’t mention any of his own solutions, only the problems.”

5. The white party: Gantz is also drawing fire for the lack of diversity in his party, which so far has an outstanding cast of older, whiter Ashkenazi men who used to work for Netanyahu.

• “In the campaigners’ war room, chomping on their keyboards, there’s no room for a mistake or a dangerous gamble that can stain the all-star team with having to deal with a junior woman or Mizrahi representative.”
• Haaretz reports that the party is aware of the issue and trying to fix it, perhaps by getting Orly Levy-Abekasis (a Mizrahi woman) aboard.
• Yedioth notes that Adina Bar-Shalom, a religious Mizrahi woman whose father was the spiritual leader of the Shas party, is also in talks with Gantz about joining up.

6. Bots demanding change: Or he could break real ground by being the first to put an automaton on his slate.

• A screenshot from Instagram shared on Twitter shows dozens of apparent bots responding to a Gantz post with identical “The nation demands change” comments.

כשאתה חדש בזה ועדיין לא יודע לשלוט בבוטים שלך pic.twitter.com/gazme1r3KI

— Ruth Elbaz – רות אלבז (@ruth_elbaz) January 31, 2019

• The party denies it is behind the fake accounts, or even that users such as ghshs_26 are fake at all.
• “Israel Resilience does not operate bots; with us, supporters are real.” the party says.

7. Gantz’s past: With so many Netanyahu appointees lining up against him (almost every party leader has either worked on Netanyahu’s staff or been a minister under him), it won’t be hard to find clips of the prime minister praising his current enemies.

• ToI’s Raphael Ahren looks back at when Netanyahu thought Gantz was “high-quality, ethical, responsible, balanced and thoughtful,” in 2011.
• “Likud itself has trodden more carefully with criticism of Gantz’s wartime performance, cognizant of the fact that the commander-in-chief, ultimately responsible for that happened on the battlefield, was Netanyahu,” Ahren writes.
• Looking at that war record, Amos Harel indeed finds enough mistakes and problems for everyone to share.
• “Protective Edge wasn’t the overwhelming success that the propagandists now present. Rather, it was a campaign full of failures and disappointments,” he writes. “Officers who served in Gantz’s headquarters at the time now offer a fairly unified opinion. They say the operation suffered from extremely faulty preparation and was full of mistakes during the fighting. They tie the three-and-a-half years of relative quiet since then not to the successful functioning of the Israel Defense Forces but rather to the relative strength between the sides, like with the northern border after the Second Lebanon War.”

8. From rally to riot: A mass protest by the Ethiopian community Wednesday is on every front page Thursday morning, after a peaceful rally that shut Tel Aviv’s main artery for hours, followed by some not so-peaceful rioting.

• The protest was held after an Ethiopian man was fatally shot by police despite apparently not posing a threat, bringing fresh charges of racism against the police to the fore.
• Everyone from the press to the police take pains to note that the violence was not the doing of the main organizers.
• “This is how a small group of rioters ruined the rally,” reads a headline in Walla news.
• Coverage of the issue seemingly only pops up when there are these big protests, as in 2015, when mass demonstrations, which also turned violent, got the government to at least say it would make changes.
• Journalist/opinionator Mairav Zonszein calls it “The most underreported story in Israel” (but later admits to some hyperbole.)

This is THE most underreported story in Israel. Black Lives Matter, in Israel too https://t.co/je2liQI5lp

— Mairav Zonszein מרב זונשיין (@MairavZ) January 30, 2019

• If placement in Israel Hayom is a sign of how Likud views the issue, things are not great, as the tabloid buries coverage on page 14.

9. Emperor of all malarkeys? A too-good-too-be-true story about Israelis finding a cancer cure-all that has gone viral may be just that, ToI’s Shoshanna Solomon finds.

• The researchers making the claim tell ToI that they aren’t publishing the results because of money problems, though most legitimate journals do not charge scientists to have articles published.
• Beyond that, experts caution that it’s too early to get hopes up over such a claim, if indeed such a cure-all is even physically possible.
• “Cancer is multiple diseases, and it is highly unlikely that this company has found a ‘cure’ for cancer any more than there is a single cure for infections,” Dr. Ben Neel, director of Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health, tells The New York Post. “More likely, this claim is yet another in a long line of spurious, irresponsible and ultimately cruel false promises for cancer patients.”