Summary of Editorials from the Hebrew Press – May 28th, 2012

Yediot Aharonot points out that, "After 15 months of uprising, the economic situation of Assad\’s regime is deteriorating, but one thing he still has money for: weapons, and lots of them. Russia sells Syria weapons for cash only, and Syria is even ready to go bankrupt – as long as the money flowing out maintains Russian support for the shreds of Assad\’s regime."

Haaretz writes: "The scope of the slaughter in Syria should be enough to justify purposeful action to show that the international community is not prepared to watch from the sidelines. The strategic considerations against taking military action in Syria are well known. So are the power struggles between the Western powers and Russia and China, which have so far prevented military intervention. However, the United Nations has the authority and capability to employ peacekeeping forces not merely as observers but also as a military force able to intervene. This authority must be applied without delay."

Ma\’ariv notes that "Syria\’s historic fate was determined in a French-British agreement, and now the Americans and the Russians are dividing the goods. In Iraq the regime was toppled with American bullets, and Khadafy would not have fallen, apparently, without NATO. The Arab Spring is also the spring of the games of the old powers, and if the cruelty does not determine events in Damascus, then Moscow\’s and Washington\’s great game will redraw the map."

Yisrael Hayom avers that "Assad has stopped being afraid.  Putin will not come to the aid of Obama. Russia regrets that it helped the West in Libya, and will not repeat what appears to it to be a mistake that harmed its traditional policy of dropping an anchor in the \’warm waters\’ of the Mediterranean Sea. If Obama cannot against Syria, there is almost no chance that he can against Iran and North Korea."

 

The Jerusalem Post comments: "Israel is grappling with the challenges of integrating diverse populations into a state that defines itself as Jewish while being embroiled in an ongoing conflict with the Palestinian people. Under the circumstances, it is only natural that Israelis are even more concerned about the threat posed by migrants and asylum-seekers than their American and European counterparts. However, there is absolutely no excuse for the sort of demagoguery witnessed at a rally in south Tel Aviv last week against the Sudanese and Eritrean migrants. Because the State of Israel was created out of the lessons of the sufferings of the Jewish people, Israel has a special obligation to the foreigner, to the sojourner in a land that is not his."

 

[Alex Fishman, Nadav Eyal and Dan Margalit wrote today\’s articles in Yediot Aharonot, Ma\’ariv and Yisrael Hayom, respectively.]