I and you and the rest

Two days after the sudden death of musical icon Arik Einstein, Israeli papers Thursday morning are still wall to wall with coverage of his passing, and there’s no shortage of voices chiming in with hagiographies of the late, great singer.

Only Haaretz has the gumption to put other stories on its front page, including a report that the state is calling for new municipal elections in Beit Shemesh and a less newsy piece on FBI tracking of philosophers Camus and Sartre.

Unlike Wednesday’s papers, which had slapshod articles on Einstein’s death forced by his untimely 11 p.m. passing, writers featured Thursday were given the benefit of a day to write their appreciations of the musical giant.

All the big names seem to have been scooped up by Yedioth Ahronoth, from Shimon Peres to Uri Zohar (who has a very similar piece in Israel Hayom) to Chava Alberstein to, for some reason, Gilad Shalit reminiscing on Einstein’s life, legacy and death.

“Tonight we light the first Hanukkah light. One flame, small, and pure olive oil, and we light it near the window, or by the door, and that’s called publicizing the miracle,” Zohar, an old friend who became ultra-Orthodox, writes. “One small oil flame – that was you. Look at how all of the nation of Israel, how they cry for you. See how they loved you. I have no doubt that the Holy One, blessed be He, accepted you with love. You were forced, you were completely forced, and you were closed off, you didn’t live in the terrible reality that we live in. You live in this world, but you didn’t understand the evil, you weren’t able to understand the evil.”

Maariv lends only a few pages to Einstein’s death, but indicates it is saving its biggest guns for the weekend edition, when it will put out a special edition dedicated to the singer, including a column by the dead man himself, who was to begin writing a weekly piece for the newspaper. Instead of focusing on hagiographies (though it has those too) the paper’s reporters filed dispatches from different stations of Einstein’s life and death, including the funeral and ceremony in Tel Aviv Thursday, his Tel Aviv home, and the beach made famous by the movie “Metzitzim,” written by and starring Einstein and Zohar.

“Forty-one years have passed since the movie — which turned the beach into a symbol of breezy, flowing and joking Israeliness … – and not much scent of the folksy mischief that Einstein and Zohar managed to capture remains. Graffiti reading ‘Zionism wallows in the sea,’ greets visitors to the beach, a mix of foreign languages fill the air and a thin metal sign bearing a city hall logo reminds you that a cult film was once filmed here. ‘Israelis love Arik Einstein. He’s from arts, no? From music?’ wonders a 20-year-old woman, while Eyal from the center of the country eulogizes: ‘This beach is a symbol of the Israel we have lost — joyous, not stuck-up, not caring about money.’”

While some were at the beach, Haaretz’s Daphna Arad was dispatched to the funeral and ceremony in Tel Aviv, which saw thousands come out to pay their last respects to Einstein, first at Rabin Square and then at Trumpeldor Cemetery. Multitudes also gathered outside Einstein’s apartment, where a vigil has been held since Tuesday night. Arad quotes one Hanna Herzig, who took the news of the death incredibly hard.

“People my age raised their children on Arik Einstein. And now they are raising their children on the same songs,” she is quoted saying outside Einstein’s home. “It is hard for me to accept that he is now in the past. Last night I couldn’t sleep, it saddened me, but I sat and listened to his songs. It is a sort of like being orphaned, even though I am not a little girl.”

More trophies, fewer guitars

Israel Hayom, which features a whopping 21-page package on Einstein, out of 31 news pages, covers everything from commentaries on Einstein’s life to remembrances of highlights of his career, which, had it gone how he wanted it, would have involved more trophies and fewer guitars.

“He wanted to be an athlete, and to serve in the army as an athletic instructor. The young Arik Einstein was an Israeli high-jump champion and at the top of shotput, played soccer on the Hapoel Tel Aviv youth team and was thought to be a promising athlete,” the paper writes in a retrospective. “But sight problems, and a family history with culture and entertainment pushed him off the path of sport instruction, and stood him instead at the singers’ microphone for the Nahal band, and from there, he started his path to conquering the world of Israeli culture.”

The paper reports that President Shimon Peres, one of the first to eulogize Einstein while on a trip to Mexico, is having a hard time adjusting to Mexico City’s altitude, and the 90-year-old has been consigned by doctors to bed rest while on the diplomatic trip.

On the Iran front (remember that?), Maariv reports that Israeli officials are saying the deal between six world powers and Tehran in Geneva, touted as a measure which will set Iran’s nuclear program back, in fact did just that — only by a whopping two weeks. “The fear in Israel is that the Iranians will take advantage of an international crisis or domestic crisis in the US to break out to a bomb with the assumption that the international community won’t be able to get together to stop them,” the paper reports. “According to their assessment, which was also relayed to foreign diplomats and senior officials, if the Iranians decide they are ready, they can push aside the agreements with the powers on freezing the program, activate all their 18,000 centrifuges (of which they currently use 10,000), and enrich enough uranium for a bomb in 36 days.”

In Haaretz, Tal Niv writes a metaphor-heavy defense of EU foreign policy czar Catherine Ashton, she who signed a deal with Iran and she who came to agreement with Israel over signing the Horizon 2020 research funding program without pulling back an EU boycott on Israeli settlements. “In this agreement, Netanyahu in practice is accepting the determination that the settlements are not a legitimate part of the State of Israel. Ashton has coerced Netanyahu into signing the agreement, which will lead in the end to the creation of a ladder with which those who hold with the ideology of the West Bank settlements can climb down from the tree,” she writes. “For now this distances Israel from its paved path to the Cuban situation: A country under embargo, isolated … a state that in the end will be choked by what it has cooked for itself. In signing on to Horizon 2020, which entails the understanding that the settlements are not legitimate in the eyes of the world, the European Union has pulled Israel’s chestnuts out of the fire.”