In today’s summary of editorials from the Hebrew Press, the Israeli Government Press Office reports that both of Israel’s major Hebrew-language newspapers “are critical of Israel’s political leaders ahead of the Annapolis Conference”
First, it seems that the largest-circulation daily in Israel, Yediot Ahronot, “compares the Annapolis meeting to the 1938 Munich conference, at which the editors claim that Czechoslovakia was, ‘gang raped’. The editors opine that the difference between British Prime Minister Chamberlain and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is that Chamberlain abandoned a distant country while Prime Minister Olmert is abandoning his own”. [Palestinians might equally be able to accuse Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of the same...]
Ma’ariv, on the other hand, “complains that Defense Minister Ehud Barak ‘proclaims that he wants peace, but finds justifications for settlement outposts, which torpedo the chance of two states and turn us into a bi-national state. And we do not have 22 countries’.” [This last phrase is a reference to the Israeli fear about becoming, eventually — with high Palestinian birth rates (though they are declining) — just one more Arab state…)
Tags: Annapolis conference, Israel