Israeli Press
Israel's Friday papers put the right's split above the Jenin strike
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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What the Israeli press put in front of its readers on Friday, and what a Palestinian reader can take from it.
Ynet#
The site's political lead all day was Itamar Ben Gvir slamming the door on Netanyahu. Invited to a meeting with the heads of Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism, the national security minister answered that a joint run with Bezalel Smotrich will not happen and that there will be no contacts on the subject, direct or indirect.
Ynet reports criticism of that inside his own party — that he ruled out a merger too fast — while Smotrich opens talks with Moshe Feiglin, and Ofer Winter refuses a merger of his own.
The military lead came at midday: a drone strike on three men outside a building under construction in Jenin, which the site marked as the first air attack in the West Bank in ten months. The same item notes that the chief of staff this week put a divisional headquarters on standby for the West Bank, citing tension and the coming holidays.
Nadav Eyal's column carries the week's most consequential disclosure, that Eyal Zamir warned Netanyahu personally the West Bank could lose control because of Jewish nationalist crime, and that the prime minister's office then briefed against him.
Itamar Eichner reports the Erez affair: the National Security Council approved opening the crossing to goods, the army prepared for it, Israel's deputy UN ambassador named 1 September, and Netanyahu's bureau then said no decision existed.
The site also carries Israel and Greece moving towards a roughly €3.1 billion air-defence agreement built on Israeli systems, and an opinion piece attacking Haaretz over its use of the words starvation and genocide — a reminder of how contested that vocabulary remains inside Israel.
Maariv#
The paper's polling analysis, by Moshe Cohen with the pollster Dr Moti Lazar, is the item with the clearest Palestinian stake. It finds the Zionist opposition at 59 seats, right-wing parties below the threshold burning around ten mandates between them, Winter taking the religious-national slot from Smotrich, and the Joint List strengthening as Arab turnout rises.
Lazar's framing is that Netanyahu is the undisputed leader of his camp and that his hour of trial has arrived, with lists due by 9 September. Maariv also reports Religious Zionism and Feiglin's Zehut negotiating a technical bloc with Netanyahu's blessing, and a confidential poll showing Ben Gvir four seats worse off in a joint run — the calculation behind his refusal.
One morning, two accounts#
Two of Israel's largest outlets published on the same morning that the army's own commanders regard settler violence as the threat to control in the West Bank, and that the political echelon is managing the story rather than the violence.
On the same day the air force struck Jenin. The gap between what the Israeli press reports about the cause and what the Israeli state does about it is, this week, unusually easy to see.
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