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UNCLAS TEL AVIV 000138 
 
STATE FOR NEA, NEA/IPA, NEA/PPD 
 
WHITE HOUSE FOR PRESS OFFICE, SIT ROOM 
NSC FOR NEA STAFF 
 
SECDEF WASHDC FOR USDP/ASD-PA/ASD-ISA 
HQ USAF FOR XOXX 
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JOINT STAFF WASHDC FOR PA 
CDR USCENTCOM MACDILL AFB FL FOR POLAD/USIA ADVISOR 
COMSOCEUR VAIHINGEN GE FOR PAO/POLAD 
COMSIXTHFLT FOR 019 
 
JERUSALEM ALSO ICD 
LONDON ALSO FOR HKANONA AND POL 
PARIS ALSO FOR POL 
ROME FOR MFO 
 
SIPDIS 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: OPRC KMDR IS
 
SUBJECT: ISRAEL MEDIA REACTION 
 
-------------------------------- 
SUBJECTS COVERED IN THIS REPORT: 
-------------------------------- 
 
Mideast 
 
 
------------------------- 
Key stories in the media: 
------------------------- 
 
All media bannered with greetings and welcome to President Obama on 
his historic inauguration day. 
 
Starting at 17:00 local time, all electronic media will carry live 
transmission of the ceremony and the speech of the President, along 
with stories coming out from their Washington-based correspondents 
as well as panels discussing the new administration. 
 
All media report that the security establishment fears that the 
center (Gush Dan) of Israel might soon fall within the range of 
Hamas rockets.  Maariv reported that Hamas and Iran are now trying 
to smuggle into Gaza long-range Farj rockets, which can reach 75 
kilometers. 
 
Maariv reported that today is the last chance for President Bush to 
pardon convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. 
 
 
 
 
¶1. Mideast 
 
Summary: 
-------- 
Veteran journalist Eitan Haber wrote on page one of the 
mass-circulation, pluralist Yediot Aharonot: "[And] we,in our little 
corner, in the Middle East, in Israel, are tensely waiting to see 
whether you will continue the tradition of American presidents of 
the past number of generations and will view us as allies, as your 
forward aircraft carrier in this bloody part of the world; will you 
will bequeath to us from the great abundance of America or will we 
be for you, heaven forbid, a nation like all other nations? ..." 
 
Independent, left-leaning Ha'aretz editorialized: " Obama, whose 
rise to power makes him the hope of many people around the world, 
would do well to personally, and quickly, renew the effort to 
achieve a stable peace that reconciles Israel with Syria and the 
Palestinians. Obama's grace period won't last long; would that he 
use it for the benefit of the Middle East." 
 
Shlomo Avineri, former FM's DG, wrote in independent, left-leaning, 
Ha'aretz (1/20): He needs to invest every effort in finding ways to 
tone down the conflict and creating mechanisms to build mutual 
trust. ..The Palestinians need assistance in building their 
institutions. The Israeli presence in the West Bank must be 
drastically reduced and the expansion of settlements prevented. Gaza 
needs to be rebuilt - but without rebuilding Hamas' regime there. 
 
Well-known Israeli author David Grossman bannered on page one of the 
independent' left-leaning Ha'aretz:  "We must speak [to 
thePalestinians], because what has happened in the Gaza Strip over 
the last few weeks sets up a mirror in which we in Israel see the 
reflection of our own face - a face that, if we were looking in from 
the outside or saw it on another people - would leave us aghast. We 
would see that our victory is not a genuine victory, and that the 
war in Gaza has not healed the spot that so badly needs a cure, but 
only further exposed the tragic and never-ending mistakes we have 
made in navigating our way 
 
Conservative, independent, The Jerusalem Post editorialized: 
"so long as Hamas remains an unrepentant enemy of peace; so long as 
it is full-throttle committed to violence; so long as it refuses to 
recognize the right of the Jewish people to a homeland anywhere; and 
so long as it won't abide by the Palestinians' international 
commitments, Hamas can never legitimately be part of the solution in 
Gaza." 
 
David Horovitz , Editor-in-Chief of the conservative, independent 
Jerusalem Post, analyzed "Israel can expect to find the incoming 
Obama administration unsympathetic, as its predecessors have been, 
to any expansion of settlements, and probably more critical than was 
the Bush administration as regards broken Israeli government 
promises to dismantle illegal outposts..." 
 
Russian-language conservative daily Vesty reported: "GOI made a gift 
[dedicated] to the inauguration day....  Most probably there will be 
no Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip at the time [of inauguration] 
and Obama won't have to start his presidential term dealing with the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict." 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Block Quotes: 
------------- 
¶I. Hail to the Chief; Wishing You Good Luck , Mr. President 
Veteran journalist Eitan Haber wrote in the mass-circulation, 
pluralist Yediot Aharonot (1/20): "-- Once you enter the Oval Office 
in the White House this evening, you won't be the private president 
of 300 million Americans any more. You will be the president of the 
free world, and billions will turn their eyes to you from today 
onward in prayer and in hope.... The entire world will hearken to 
your every word, whisper and winks, and will want to see you as the 
savior and redeemer of all the troubles of the world...  And we, in 
our little corner, in the Middle East, in Israel, are tensely 
waiting to see whether you will continue the tradition of American 
presidents of the past number of generations and will view us as 
allies, as your forward aircraft carrier in this bloody part of the 
world; will you will bequeath to us from the great abundance of 
America or will we be for you, heaven forbid, a nation like all 
other nations? ..." 
 
II. "With the power of hope" 
Independent, left-leaning Ha'aretz editorialized (1/20): "You don't 
have to be an American to get excited by the swearing-in of Barack 
Obama as president of the United States today.... It's a great 
moment for Obama, but even greater for the American people, who are 
once again teaching humanity a lesson on the ability to adapt, 
change and ascend....The Israeli-Arab conflict will be one of the 
Obama administration's many challenges. Obama, whose rise to power 
makes him the hope of many people around the world, would do well to 
personally, and quickly, renew the effort to achieve a stable peace 
that reconciles Israel with Syria and the Palestinians. Obama's 
grace period won't last long; would that he use it for the benefit 
of the Middle East. 
 
      III. "Can Obama do it?" 
Shlomo Avineri, former FM's  DG, wrote in independent, left-leaning, 
Ha'aretz (1/20): 
 
It's hard to count the proposals made to Barack Obama on the 
appropriate way to deal with the Israeli-Arab conflict.... All the 
proposal-makers focus on how to reach a final peace agreement 
between Israel and the Palestinians, and all of them believe that 
deeper, more determined involvement by the United States will bring 
that about. In discussing past failures in U.S. policy on the issue, 
the proposal-makers always offer explanations that pertain to the 
details of each case, as one would expect from diplomats who can't 
see the forest for the trees. None of them raises the core question 
- whether the United States is at all capable of resolving 
complicated national conflicts, or whether the failures we've seen 
stem from a single, essential issue. ... It merits mentioning that 
in the Middle East, the United States is capable of achieving 
success only in two scenarios. When there is a war, it can end it or 
temper it. When the parties reach an agreement on their own but 
still have a few issues that need resolving - as during the visit by 
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat or when negotiating the Oslo 
Accords...In the absence of these two scenarios, and lacking the 
political will of at least one party, the United States has 
invariably failed, as could be observed from the Madrid Conference 
to the Camp David Summit in 2000, the road map and Annapolis - all 
highly photogenic events that failed to spawn a peace accord. In all 
this diplomatic verbosity, the gulf between the two parties is too 
wide on core issues like Jerusalem, refugees and borders. The 
Palestinians' inability to form a representative national entity and 
resolve the differences between Fatah and Hamas through nonviolent 
means renders negotiations with Israel meaningless. This is the 
reality with which Obama must contend, and with caution. He needs to 
invest every effort in finding ways to tone down the conflict and 
creating mechanisms to build mutual trust. ..The Palestinians need 
assistance in building their institutions. The Israeli presence in 
the West Bank must be drastically reduced and the expansion of 
settlements prevented. Gaza needs to be rebuilt - but without 
rebuilding Hamas' regime there. Should Obama attempt to initiate a 
dramatic move such as the 2000 Camp David Summit, he will receive 
some momentary glory and flattering media coverage, but he is 
destined to fail. He would do better to try to attain what is 
attainable. 
 
IV. " Israel's success in Gaza only proves it is strong, not right" 
Well-known Israeli author David Grossman bannered on page one of the 
independent, left-leaning Ha'aretz (1/20): "Like the pairs of foxes 
in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by their tails, a 
flaming torch between them, so Israel and the Palestinians - despite 
the imbalance of power - drag each other along.... we should be 
paying heed to another voice - the one that says the Israel Defense 
Forces' successes in the confrontation with Hamas do not prove that 
it was right to embark on such a massive campaign.... Obviously, the 
Palestinians cannot be let off the hook for their crimes and 
mistakes.....We cannot pardon the Palestinians or treat them 
forgivingly, as if it were obvious that whenever they feel put upon, 
violence will always be their sole response, the one they embrace 
almost automatically. Yet even when the Palestinians act with 
indiscriminate violence, when they use suicide bombings and Qassam 
rocket fire, Israel is stronger than them... One day, after all, we 
will seek to heal the wounds we inflict today. How will that day 
ever come if we do not understand that our military might cannot be 
the primary instrument for carving out a path for ourselves in this 
region? How will that day ever come if we fail to comprehend just 
how graveness is the responsibility that lies on our shoulders by 
dint of our complex and fateful relations, both past and future, 
with the Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the 
Galilee? When the clouds of colored smoke dissipate from the 
politicians' claims of sweeping and decisive victory; when we 
discover the actual achievements of this operation, and how far they 
are from what we really need in order to live a normal life here; 
when we finally admit that a whole country eagerly hypnotized 
itself, because it needed so badly to believe that Gaza would cure 
it of Lebanon-itis - maybe then we will settle accounts with those 
who, time after time, incite the Israeli public, whipping them into 
a frenzy of arrogance and a euphoria of power. Those who have taught 
us over the years to scoff at belief in peace and any hope for 
change in our relations with the Arabs. Those who have convinced us 
that the Arabs understand only force, and therefore that is the only 
language we can use in our dealings with them.  We must speak to the 
Palestinians: That is the most important conclusion from the most 
recent round of bloodshed. We must speak also to those who do not 
recognize our right to exist here.... We must speak to them, and 
create, within this closed-off, deaf reality, the very possibility 
for speech....We must speak to them as part of a calculated 
strategy.... We must speak out of understanding, born as we look out 
at the horrible devastation, as we grasp that the harm we are 
capable of inflicting on each other, each people in its own way...We 
must speak, because what has happened in the Gaza Strip over the 
last few weeks sets up a mirror in which we in Israel see the 
reflection of our own face - a face that, if we were looking in from 
the outside or saw it on another people - would leave us aghast. We 
would see that our victory is not a genuine victory, and that the 
war in Gaza has not healed the spot that so badly needs a cure, but 
only further exposed the tragic and never-ending mistakes we have 
made in navigating our way. 
      ¶V. "The True Test" 
 
Conservative, independent, The Jerusalem Post editorialized (1/20): 
"By the time Barack Obama is sworn in today as America's 44th 
president, every Israeli soldier, save for Gilad Schalit, will 
likely be out of Gaza. And as President Obama starts his first full 
day at the White House tomorrow, Hamas will already be setting the 
stage for the next conflagration.... Ordinary Gazans, much as they 
are wont to identify with Hamas's delusional sense of triumph, will 
find their gratification tempered by coming face-to-face with the 
price paid for Hamas's "achievements"... WE WILL know soon enough 
whether Operation Cast Lead achieved its purpose. The test is not 
whether there is "quiet" in the south while the terrorist 
organizations take a break. The true test is whether Hamas is 
allowed to realize its "holy" plan to rearm. Using all its 
intelligence capabilities, the IDF needs to intervene the moment 
Gaza's workshops resume producing Kassams, the instant its 
laboratories renew the production of explosives, the minute tunnels 
under the Philadelphi Corridor are refurbished for the smuggling of 
weapons and arms supplies. Failure to act without delay will return 
Israel to the intolerable state of affairs that prevailed during the 
eight years prior to December 27, 2008....Be that as it may, beyond 
doing the obvious - making certain that those who brought 
devastation upon Gaza aren't given the wherewithal to do so again by 
rearming - Europe and the international community need to restrain 
themselves and not turn Hamas into the project manager and chief 
financial officer for the reconstruction of the Strip... Indeed, so 
long as Hamas remains an unrepentant enemy of peace; so long as it 
is full-throttle committed to violence; so long as it refuses to 
recognize the right of the Jewish people to a homeland anywhere; and 
so long as it won't abide by the Palestinians' international 
commitments, Hamas can never legitimately be part of the solution in 
Gaza. Not even under the fig leaf of a Palestinian unity 
government." 
VI. "No to Hamas, but no, too, to an expanded Israel" 
 
David Horovitz , Editor-in-Chief of the conservative, independent 
Jerusalem Post, analyzed (1/20):"[And] Welcome...,to Barack Obama, 
the agent of change who, according to his senior adviser David 
Axelrod, "intends to engage early and aggressively with diplomacy 
all over the world... I think you'll see him act quickly." 
Conventional wisdom has it that Israel chose to engage aggressively 
with Hamas over the past three weeks because it knew, give or take 
the odd United Nations Security Council abstention and diplomatic 
spat, that the Bush administration would fundamentally support its 
right to protect its civilians from rocket attack even at the cost 
of widespread damage to Gaza. Conventional wisdom further has it 
that Israel is intent on getting its troops back out of Gaza by 
Tuesday's inauguration, provided the new fragile truce hasn't been 
too rudely shattered by rocket fire, so that Israel-Hamas is not the 
most pressing item on the incoming president's foreign policy hot 
list....Israel's worry, according to such wisdom, was that Obama, 
who has said he was "deeply concerned" about the loss of civilian 
life in Gaza and Israel, might not fully back the resort to force 
and might even break international ranks by opening a dialogue with 
Hamas. After all, this is the man who has said he will depart from 
Bush's policies and entertain tough diplomacy with Iran and Syria. 
Within the Obama camp itself, however, there is an adamant 
insistence that the new president has no intention of legitimizing 
Hamas... But if Israeli anxiety seems misplaced as regards Obama's 
empathy with Israel over the Kassams and his antipathy to Hamas in 
Gaza, his attitude to the future of the West Bank may indeed prove 
to pose concerns and challenges, and not only for the most strident 
and uncompromising supporters of the settlement enterprise...To 
listen to Nicolas Sarkozy in Jerusalem on Sunday night, this kind of 
Israeli-Palestinian deal, indeed a wider regional "great final peace 
plan," is there for the taking, if only Israel would "run the risk 
of achieving peace." It is unlikely that the pragmatic Obama is as 
ready as the French president to ignore such inconvenient realities 
as Hamas's enduring dominance of Gaza, its vast support among 
ordinary Gazan and West Bank Palestinians, and the failure to date 
of even the relatively moderate Palestinian Authority headed by 
Mahmoud Abbas to publicly espouse viable positions for a two-state 
solution....Nevertheless, Europe will be pushing for a final deal 
and urging increased American pressure for compromise on both Israel 
and the PA. Many prominent European leaders, moreover, will be 
arguing to the new US administration that the shared interest in 
thwarting Iran's nuclear drive requires progress on the 
Israeli-Palestinian track - to keep relatively moderate Arab states 
on board, and to deny Iranian-backed Islamists like Hamas and 
Hizbullah a key recruiting tool... In terms of the contours of a 
permanent accord, Obama, in the brief interview he gave the Post 
when he visited Israel last July, showed an absence of any 
Bush-style instinctive sympathy for an expanded Israel.On 
settlements, he said "Israel should abide by previous agreements and 
commitments that have been made, and aggressive settlement 
construction would seem to violate the spirit at least, if not the 
letter, of agreements that have been made previously... There are 
those who would argue that the more settlements there are, the more 
Israel has to invest in protecting those settlements and the more 
tensions arise that may undermine Israel's long-term security."... 
Israel can expect to find the incoming Obama administration 
unsympathetic, as its predecessors have been, to any expansion of 
settlements, and probably more critical than was the Bush 
administration as regards broken Israeli government promises to 
dismantle illegal outposts....As much as the European leaders' 
Jerusalem gathering on Sunday was a stand-by-Israel photo op, it was 
also an unprecedentedly vigorous "let's push for a deal" plea to the 
new America of Barack Obama.... We are about to find out...." 
      VII. "Waiting for the President" 
Russian-language conservative daily Vesty reported (1/20): "Today 
the inauguration of President-Elect Barack Obama will take place. 
He will swear in his faith to the interests of the country and 
American people on the Bible that was used at the inauguration 
ceremony of the 16th US President Abraham Lincoln. ... Many world 
leaders already greeted Obama on his inauguration.  GOI made a gift 
[dedicated] to the inauguration day as well.  Most probably there 
will be no Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip at the time [of 
inauguration] and Obama won't have to start his presidential term 
dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... at least, not from 
the first day of his presence in the White House." 
 
CUNNIGHAM