Yeah, but there’s still death

While Europe was busy imposing restrictive new directives, Finance Minister Yair Lapid decided to make life here a smidgen easier and pull back on some of his planned tax hikes. Both stories dominate the front pages of the Hebrew press on Thursday.

Yedioth Ahronoth leads off with a massive Lapid package and just in case you might not know where it stands, runs the bajillion-point headline “Less, but still painful.”

The less, they note, refers to a planned income tax hike, and a cancellation of child and student benefits. On top of that a tax on household staples and a tax on home improvements will also be canceled (assuming you don’t land on Community Chest).

The paper has a lot of insider baseball on what caused the dramatic pullback (which has been in the works for a month), writing that the powerful Knesset Finance Committee upped the heat on Lapid until he cried uncle. “We made an unprecedented change to the map of decrees,” the paper quotes an overly poetic Nissan Slomiansky, head of said committee, saying. “We promised that the middle class and poor would not be harmed.”

Unsurprisingly, many say the changes don’t go far enough. Tzachi Shpitzen, a proud father of three young’ns, and a less proud owner of a NIS 12,000 monthly bill to take care of said kids, wonders why only parents of older moneypits will get child benefits, which will only stay in place for kids born in 2003 or earlier. “I’m not downplaying how much fifth-graders cost, and certainly not teenagers, But in any case I still assume that everyone knows the highest cost for kids is under the age of 3.”

The cancellation of the evil decrees may have won over some new supporters for the new budget, but Maariv reports that coalition partner Yisrael Beytenu is threatening to vote against it if a government reform bill put forward by one of their MKS does not make it to the plenum in the next two weeks. Unfortunately, if the reactions Maariv compiled are any indication, the complicated bill has no chance of getting out of committee in the time demanded.

But the real scoop in the story is the Maariv reporter’s amazing find of an amorphous blob (unnamed as always) that hails from Likud, Yesh Atid and Jewish Home and is able to sum up the problem on behalf of all three of them, in perfectly concise and quotable Hebrew. “Every party in the coalition has a bill, or at least something they deal with,” the blob tells the Maariv reporter who clearly has no problem making up attribution. “Yisrael Beytenu has no bill, and thus they came suddenly with this threat to vote on during the current Knesset session.”

The EU decision to set the West Bank outside Israel’s borders is still the biggest story around. Haaretz, which obtained notes on various European delegations’ reactions to the new guidelines, reports that if Israeli settlers want to single out one European for their bile, it should be the guy with the bad food and worse teeth who likes Rowan Atkinson jokes: “The British diplomats ‘warmly welcomed the guidelines and asked why they were not applicable to individuals,’ an official with the European External Action Service wrote. A member of the EEAS replied that there were several reasons for this. One was that it involved hundreds of thousands of people. ‘It was considered impractical to ‘chase’ individual persons and would also mean that they would be singled out,’ he said.”

The paper inexplicably combines the Europe story with the news that the Palestinians will decide Thursday whether or not to return to the negotiating table. Far right extremist Gideon Levy bashes Europe for its blatant anti-Semitism and calls on Jews everywhere to settle West Bank hilltops and build the Third Temple.

Just kidding.

“Thank you, Europe,” he actually writes, drawing a straight line between Europe’s decision and peace talks with the Palestinians. “Through one administrative decision you have already managed to rattle Israel’s insufferable complacency. With one administrative decision, necessitated by the situation and without a doubt correct, you have already undermined Israel’s arrogance and conceit, which are responsible for the view that the stance of the entire world simply does not matter to this country.”

Israel Hayom, meanwhile, reports that Israel’s request to push off the EU decision will be accepted after Dear Leader Benjamin Netanyahu phoned EU leaders and brought them to their knees with the force of his logic. The paper writes that Netanyahu called the leaders of France, Greece, Malta and Austria, telling them all the same thing: “There are things more urgent in the Middle East that need to be taken care of first, like the Syrian civil war and Iran’s nuclear weapons.”

We should be taking advice on priorities from the guy who included Malta on his list of urgent must-calls?

The always charming Dan Margalit writes in the paper that the European missive is the fault of Israeli diplomats abroad failing at their jobs and they should not be given work benefits they are currently on strike for.

Haaretz reports that those same labor sanctions may be holding up a decision on the appointment of Jacob Frenkel as the head of the Bank of Israel, who is under fire after reports surfaced of him trying to take a five-finger discount on some airport perfume. “The strike will disrupt the contacts between the Israeli consulate in Hong Kong and local authorities there, and delay the ministry’s assistance in providing information on the case to the Turkel committee and Weinstein. It will also prevent a detailed interview with Israel’s consul in Hong Kong, Eli Gil,” the paper reports. “Gil, who was rushed to the airport in 2006 to help Frenkel out of his run-in with the Hong Kong authorities, gave the details on the telephone to the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser last week. However, additional details may be required as well as a confrontation between Gil and Frenkel, should any contradictions arise between their stories.”

Yedioth marks the opening of the Maccabiah games later Thursday with a story about Sasha Alterman, who 17 years ago became a symbol of the bridge disaster when a photo of her being rescued from the Yarkon river went around the world. Today, the paper reports, she is feeling much better, after 30 surgeries, and is looking for love after getting a finance degree and a job as a personal trainer. “It’s a miracle,” her father Colin tells the paper, according to free translation of his remarks back into English. “Today she is a young woman. Still unmarried, and working in an area she loves. I will always remember the support we got from the Israeli public. The time has come to forget about this and continue on.”