Ma’ariv notes that "History will certainly define 2011 as the year of great surprises in the Middle East. We don’t succeed in digesting one development and a new surprising development lands on us. The Arab people broke the barrier of fear, went out to the city squares and astounded with mass uprisings against their tyrannical leaders. We declared, in January, on the coming of the ‘Arab Spring’. Within a short time the regimes of Tunisia and Libya fell, and in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak was toppled and stood before the law as an ordinary citizen. The result of elections is an ‘Islamic Winter’: 75% of the voters choose to vote in the first two rounds for Islamic parties – the Islamic Brotherhood and the Salafists – and the liberal secular bloc who initiated and lead the uprising received the remaining vote, constituting a minority." The author advises that "We must open our eyes and avoid officially relating to what is happening in the Arab counties. Our reactions will be exploited by hostile elements to ignite attention away from severe internal problems towards the direction of Israel – the hate of their souls. In parallel, we must try to find moderate elements in order, together with them, to maintain regional geopolitical stability."
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The Jerusalem Post writes: "Discrimination and violence against women – purportedly motivated by religious sensibilities – have spiraled out of control. The recent spate of incidents is so severe that it brought the issue of gender discrimination to the center of public discourse. Significantly, PM Netanyahu, who opened Sunday’s cabinet meeting by denouncing discrimination against women, has called on haredi legislators to speak out publicly against the phenomenon and ask their spiritual leaders to do so as well. This hyper-puritanical world view is, furthermore, being accommodated outside strictly ultra-Orthodox circles. At least two state-funded health funds have published special brochures in deference to ultra-Orthodox sensitivities. Neither ‘breast’ nor ‘cancer’ is mentioned in these brochures. Similarly, public bus companies have allowed haredi activists to enforce gender segregation. By caving in to these unreasonable demands, the bus companies and health funds are giving them legitimacy. And the inevitable side effect is a feeling of entitlement and self-righteousness that emboldens some particularly extreme haredi men to aggressively confront women – whether on the bus, in the streets of Beit Shemesh or elsewhere."
Yediot Aharonot contends that "Those who ‘steal into’ our borders from Africa are young, courageous, determined, and grateful to their country of refuge and want very much to be Israelis. They are likely to be a blessing and it would be worthwhile to absorb them."
Yisrael Hayom remarks, "There are no positive sides to the crisis between Israel and Turkey. But as long as the feeling of Israeli obligation towards Turkey is low, as it is today, this is an opportunity for us to recognize, officially, the Armenian holocaust, even if we do not adjoin to it punishment for the denial of the Armenian holocaust, as did the French Parliament."
Haaretz draws a comparison between the situation in Israel today and that of Serbia in the 1990s: "During the 1990s, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic rejected European demands to stop oppressing the Albanian majority in Kosovo. After that, he rebuffed NATO’s demand to remove his forces from Kosovo and to stop expelling tens of thousands of Albanians, mostly Muslims, from their homes. In Israel, as in Serbia, the regime tries to sway public opinion using a nationalist worldview and a victim and ghetto mentality. Netanyahu is not a war criminal. But the great similarity between his worldview and that of Milosevic with regard to everything involving the conflict in the territories invites us to draw conclusions from the Kosovo conflict."
[Yaron London, Tzvi Gabai and Yossi Beilin wrote today’s articles in Yediot Aharonot, Ma’ariv and Yisrael Hayom, respectively.]