With a crucial vote on the Israeli government’s new austerity program due in the Cabinet, both Tel Aviv tabloids lead the front pages of their print editions with economic stories. Only their electronic editions are updated with news of the killing of two settlers in a shooting attack on their truck near the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
Yediot Ahronot’s headline reads: “10,000 distressed families to be hit again.” The heading tops a report saying that the unemployed, single-parent families and new immigrants will lose an average of 600 shekels (about $120) each as a result of the cuts in government benefits if the program is passed.
Maariv, under the headline: “PM determined to push program through without changes,” stresses the political angles and says Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is pressuring each wavering minister individually to ensure approval of the program, although the paper quotes insiders as estimating that he will have to compromise on the proposed cuts in the defense budget, as well as on subsidies to poor families.
The papers also feature photographs of the massive traffic jams that formed in the Sharon area in central Israel Monday as a result of security measures implemented following an alert that one or more suicide attackers had crossed into Israel from the West Bank. Another security-related story on both front pages is the delay in the departure of the Haifa Maccabi football team for Cyprus, until the Nicosia government agreed to allow an armed escort.
Leader writers and pundits tie the security and economy issues together in various ways. Maariv devotes its editorial to the hunt for militants and its effect on the economy and on the lives of the citizens caught up in the dragnet.
“The entire Sharon area was under military control last night,” the paper complains. “The residents were warned of the danger, and while many chose a self-imposed curfew and stayed at home, others were trapped for hours in traffic jams many kilometers long. Even when such operations end in success and the terrorist is foiled and the bombing averted, we must ask ourselves what the price is.”
On Maariv’s opinion page, columnist Michal Aharoni also ties the economy to the security situation. “If the peace process had not been halted and there were no terror attacks,” she writes, “tourism would not have ground to a halt, investments would not have dried up, and the Treasury would not have dared to come up with a program that harms the weak more than anyone else. It is the security situation which legitimizes the measures that no one would have dreamed of a few years ago.”
In all the verbiage that has been expended on “explaining” the economic crisis to the Israelis, Aharoni complains, “no one has spelled it out the way it is: Bashing the Palestinians means less income. You want to go on holding onto the territories by force forever? Then you will be economically bashed yourselves.”
Aharoni believes “the equation is simple and painful: As long as there is no peace, there will be no foreign investment or tourism. As long as we continue the policies of assassinations and curfews, most states will avoid maintaining full and normal trade relations with us, and there will be boycotts of our products. As long as the state has to spend vast sums on military operations, on protecting the settlements and on calling up emergency reserves, there will be no money for unemployment benefits. As long as we fight, we must pay.”
On Yediot Ahronot’s opinion page, columnist Yigal Sarna, in a piece laced with irony, comments on the killing of civilians in the Gaza air raid last week. “Now that the Israel Air Force has turned to terrorist attacks, it has erased the elitist aura surrounding it and the military aristocracy is killing the same kind of people, in the same kind of numbers, as your average primitive suicide bomber,” Sarna says, terming this “an achievement for egalitarianism.”
Abandoning the sarcasm, Sarna describes “the seemingly endless cycle of violence that produces intolerable number of fatalities, cripples, bereaved families, heart-rending funerals of the victims of one-ton bombs or drive-by attacks on cars. There are contacts to end the fighting and ­ at the critical moment ­ the chances are reversed by a last-minute assassination. It is as if some sadistic or crazy general is sitting there and willfully tormenting our tortured souls. It’s all quiet, and then boom! A one-ton smart bomb or a five-kilo stupid bomb.”
Sarna has no doubts as to who is responsible: “Israelis and Palestinians have become soul-brothers in the sense that they both know that their bad leaders are taking them to the abyss, but still they hang on to them, like infants afraid of getting lost in a crowd hang on to their mothers. On both sides, the controls are in the hands of those who would rather let loose a one-ton bomb, or a suicide bomber, than sit for months in painstaking negotiations.
“So we all sit tensely and wait for the ‘mega-attack’ that Fouad (Ben-Eliezer) keeps talking about. The ‘mega’ that will kill thousands of Israelis, and that, according to cautious intelligence assessments and reckless rumors will bring about a ‘mini-Nakba’ for the Palestinians, something like the 1948 expulsion all over again, but controlled and limited. That’s our political program ­ the mega and the mini of it.”
“Meanwhile,” continues Sarna, “we will go on being killed for nothing, tormenting ourselves and them. And this viciousness that is setting in here won’t stop at any border fence. Because someone, whose strategy is assassinating wanted men on the other side, adopts the same strategy in the war on unemployment here, telling people whose world has been destroyed by the loss of their jobs that ‘There’s no money for unemployment benefits. Go sweep the streets, you parasites.’”
“Until all the pistol-packing leaders with their uniforms and keffiyehs like Yasser Arafat or the ones in their battledress jackets with general ranks like Fouad and Sharon are replaced by civilian managerial types, who want nothing but to create prosperity, the cease-fires will continue to be assassinated, and the only light at the end of the tunnel will be the blinding flash of the mega-attack.”

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