Headlines: Europe feels like Israel
>All the newspapers open with the alert to travelers in Europe, issued by the US, warning of possible terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda. Stories highlight the sense of vindication, or even schadenfreude, in seeing that Israel is not alone in facing Islamist terrorism (Ma’ariv: “London is not less dangerous than Sderot”; Yedioth: “Traveling to Europe, feeling like in Israel”).
>Security Minister Ehud Barak (Labour) and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar (Likud) are asking for another government debate regarding the expulsion of 400 children of illegal migrants. Interior Minister, Eli Yishay (Shas), in response, attacks Sa’ar for harboring illegals in the education system and Barak for a “rich man’s morality”. He really has made it his life’s mission to persecute those children. But Yisrael Hayom has a solution [Heb]: convert them to Judaism.
>Ha’aretz has another exclusive: a report by the highly respected jurist, Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, suggests that the state attorney’s office distorted the evidence in order to justify the closing of cases against police officers involved in the shooting of three Israeli Arabs during the October 2000 events.
>The kibbutz movement is a 100 years old, and showing it, but it still captures [Heb] the Israeli imagination.
The Sidelines: Liberman, Barak, and the freeze
>The settlement freeze issue has been exiled to the inside pages. The cabinet will discuss the issue on Wednesday [Heb], but Netanyahu still does not have the votes, if he even wants them. Ha’aretz, in response, urges the PM to change coalition partners. In Ma’ariv, anonymous sources accuse Barak of trying to manipulate Netanyahu into a freeze deal, in order to salvage his sinking political standing. Who are these sources? Well, on the popular news website Ynet, Foreign Minister Lieberman (Yisrael Beitenu) is quoted making similar accusations, while also arguing that Obama intends to force a peace deal on Israel after the freeze extension.
>The IDF Chief of Staff visits Bethlehem to meet heads of Palestinian security services.
>The IDF will not deploy anti-rocket systems in Israeli towns near Gaza. Heads of local councils in the region criticize the decision.
>The Israeli commission of inquiry, examining the Gaza flotilla incident, wants [Heb] to interview some more senior officers. It was supposed to interview only the chief of staff.
>Ma’ariv publishes a hateful screed against Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mairead Maguire, accusing her of anti-Semitism, because she thinks Hamas should not be included in the EU’s list of terrorist organizations, and because (Ma’ariv falsely claims) she doesn’t care about human rights violations in other parts of the world.
>A national-religious MK drafts bill to rename Israel “Israel– The Jewish State”, a clever ruse to compel Palestinians and the world to recognize it as such, on a technicality.
>The Rabbi news items just keep coming, and this one is no joke: a rabbi planned an armed ambush on a man suspected of raping his daughter. The incident became a full-blown shootout.
>Another Rabbi approves of having sex for national security purposes (Yedioth).
>The head of manpower in the IDF meets an ultra-orthodox leader to discuss army enlistment for members of his community.
>A huge new tunnel is planned [Heb] near the Western (Wailing) Wall in Jerusalem. Muslims claim they were not consulted; organizations advocating pluralism and women’s rights demand an expansion of the space allocated to women in the sex-segregated Western Wall compound.
>Now Yedioth is also peddling the bogus story, about high royalties in Israel pushing offshore natural gas development to Lebanon. Only this time the worry is that Iran will benefit, not Hezbollah. Sigh. This is all part of intense lobbying by natural gas companies to prevent a change to their outrageously high share from recently made discoveries.
>Higher economic growth in Israel mainly benefits the rich. Meanwhile, the poor get hit by another increase [Heb] in bread prices.
>The “demographic demon” is alllllllive!
>Will new members who joined Likud strengthen the hard right, or Netanyahu?
>Israel studies proliferate [Heb] in the US.
The Bottom Lines: Security meets the law
>A plethora of reports regarding Israeli security forces violence and inappropriate behavior: two soldiers convicted of using an 11-year old child as a human shield during the Gaza war (a rare occasion; the few investigations that are opened are usually closed without an indictment); a policeman shot and killed a Palestinian worker trying to illegally enter Israel; the state will have to pay [Heb] a Palestinian $30,000 that was probably stolen by soldiers; a soldier was sentenced to 14 months in jail for receiving a bribe at a checkpoint; the police are accused of using dangerous expired gas grenades to disperse demonstrations in the Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan; and an off-duty Israeli soldier was severely beaten [Heb] by policemen, because he leaned on a squad car and asked a question.
>The legal counsel of the Shin Bet (the Israeli internal security service), while promoting a draconian new anti-terror law, boasts [Heb] that the organization is under judicial review. Really?
>Among the candidates to head Israel’s witness protection program: a general kicked out of the IDF for perjury, and a police commander kicked out of the police for mishandling the October 2000 events, during which 12 Israeli Palestinians and one Palestinian resident of the Occupied Territories died (Ma’ariv). In Israel, incompetence is sometimes punished, but always recycled.