A day late, the Hebrew papers weigh in on the Democratic National Convention and on the American presidential elections that are just three months away. As the date approaches and the lineups are set, the media in Israel are more blatantly picking sides.
The Sheldon Adelson-owned Israel Hayom appears to be coming down clearly on the side of the Republicans and Donald Trump — to nobody's surprise whatsoever. This is the paper, after all, that had wall-to-wall support for Mitt Romney during the last election. The paper's front-page headline of its coverage of the Democratic National Convention berates US President Barack Obama. "Obama sees Hillary as a third term — for himself," it says, the obvious implication being that a Clinton presidency would be equally disastrous for Israel in the paper's eyes.
Before leading into its coverage of the DNC, however, Israel Hayom is sure to report a poll that finds Trump leading Clinton by seven points. The fact that Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight forecasts puts Clinton ahead by most measures is apparently irrelevant.
The paper's American politics pundit-in-chief Boaz Bismuth reports from Philadelphia that "after eight years in the White House, Clinton is the most optimistic thing that Obama can offer. In his speech at the convention Obama continued to speak, like in 2008, about hope. If Hillary symbolizes hope, freshness and renewal, Donald Trump has many reasons to be optimistic."
The DNC, he says, "appears a bit detached from the world we live in." To prove that the Democrats are selling a false utopia, he points to Syrian President Bashar Assad's tightening grip on Aleppo, with help from the Russians, as a case in point. (Bismuth's argument is much like his metallic namesake, the 83rd element: as dense as lead, yet brittle.)
On the opposite end of the political spectrum, Haaretz reports that the Democrats are going on the offensive against Trump and have assumed the rhetoric of a centrist party. Whereas Trump is projecting the message that the United States is crumbling and needs to be made "great again," the Democrats, the paper says, reinforce that it is actually greater than ever. Yedioth Ahronoth also features star-spangled headlines accompanying photos of Obama and Hillary embracing, calling the president "The lightning Hillary needed" — a pun on the Hebrew meaning of Obama's first name.
Haaretz's Chemi Shalev joins in the Democrats' blistering criticism of Trump in highlighting the differences in rhetoric from the two parties, making it all too obvious where he and the paper stand on the upcoming election.
"Trump declared that the American army is a disaster, the Democrats extol its virtues. Trump pronounces his desire to withdraw from the world, to undermine the NATO alliance and abandon new allies like the Baltic states to Vladimir Putin, and the Democrats respond that the US needs to stand behind them through fire and water. Trump blatantly calls for Russia to hack American computers and steal Hillary Clinton's secret cables that disappeared from the inspection of the private server she set up in her home while serving as secretary of state, and the Democrats, along with America and the world as a whole, are incapable of grasping how a presidential candidate — moreover someone from the Right — could express so explicitly a treasonous crime," he writes.
Yedioth Ahronoth's Nahum Barnea also pulls no punches, saying the American people are still struggling to decide whether Trump "is the village idiot, a running joke, or a political genius." He calls the DNC speeches "the union of the House of Montague and the House of Capulet" in its bringing together of erstwhile rival Clintons and Obamas.
In an aside about social media, he says that Twitter has been a "phenomenal success" in the US, but in Israel less so, "perhaps because Israelis have a hard time limiting their thoughts to 140 characters." This coming from a guy whose rambling weekend column continues for another 2,700 words (roughly 16,000 characters).
Irrespective of their political leanings, after a slow news day at home the two tabloids are preoccupied with the contamination of the nation's cornflakes supply, a disaster that will have long-term implications for breakfasts from Eilat to Kiryat Shmona.
The scandal is over the contamination of cornflakes in Israel with salmonella, but the company that produces the cereal didn't notify the public when it found out a month ago.
Israel Hayom and Yedioth Ahronoth both go all-out, with analyses and opinion columns about how the public has lost trust in the company. Unilever Israel's CEO "learned the lesson the hard way" that there are no secrets in this new world of ours, as Galit Avishai says in Israel Hayom. Yedioth Ahronoth's Shoshana Hen says that the company's "great sin is the sin of concealing."
That being said, the two tabloids are guilty of covering up the US State Department's scathing condemnation of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank as "provocative." Neither of the tabloids reports on the statement, but it's the top story on the front page of Haaretz.
By Ilan Ben Zion
