1. Open and shut: Israel is opening back up. Well, kind of. What was supposed to mark the first day of most stores being able to reopen, a sign of almost-normalcy in a sea of lockdowns, is beset by continued closures and complaints about a job half done.
- Despite the lifting of restrictions at midnight, some 200 chains, including leading stores in clothing, optics, home decor, camping and sports, as well as cafes and restaurants, said Saturday night they would not open their doors, complaining about a lack of state help, restrictive measures and a lack of childcare.
- “Store owners are returning to work, but are fuming over the state’s neglect and claiming that they feel like they are allowing them to open stores under conditions that will not allow them to make a reasonable living, just so they can avoid having to compensate businesses,” Walla reports.
- “Without schools being open, there’s no meaning to opening stores,” reads a top headline on the website for Channel 12 news, paraphrasing from a letter by the heads of Israel’s largest labor federation and an umbrella businesses association.
- But the channel also reports later Sunday that despite threats, at least one chain that said it would be shut, baby goods store Shilav, is in fact open.
- Haaretz’s Amos Harel complains in a headline, “With hidden guidelines and no clear policy, Israel is sending people out of their homes.”
- “Some of the regulations are vaguely worded, others contradict each other or lack any logic. Enforcement by police and inspectors is also not uniform or explained. The cabinet discussed opening hair salons and beauty parlors and Haaretz reported that Culture Minister Miri Regev insisted on allowing laser hair removal treatments to resume. While lines snaked around IKEA, the police conducted a heroic chase after a lone surfer, far out at sea, off the Tel Aviv beach,” he writes.
2. Revenge of the bean-counters: On the other side, the Finance Ministry is annoyed at business owners for seeming to want their cake and to eat it, and some state money, too.
- “It cannot be that companies and chains, some of whom were in poor financial shape before the coronavirus crisis, are trying to squeeze money out of taxpayers, while other businesses are carrying the burden,” Kan quotes a source in the Finance Ministry saying.
- “They cried this whole time that their sales were being hurt, and now they are preventing their workers from going back to work and selling,” Finance Ministry director Shai Babad tells Army Radio , calling their decisions to not open and even threaten to fire workers “irresponsible sanctions.”
- “At the height of the crisis, there were 90,000 unemployed in the retail industry, and some of them are returning to work, so we are talking about 60,000 workers, which is not nothing, but to call a strike over it is wrongheaded,” Channel 13 quotes more Finance Ministry people saying.
3. We’ll open if they won’t: While those who can open don’t want to, those who can’t open are itching to join the club. Channel 12 reports that gyms and personal trainers are now complaining that they want to open too after “watching hair salons, beauty salons and IKEA branches open.”
- “Our sector actually supports health, we are a health industry, people are not dying just from coronavirus, but also from obesity and diabetes,” the owner of one gym says.
- In Yedioth Ahronoth, columnist Sarit Rosenbloom writes that most of those stores refusing to open should probably remain shut anyway: “While countries around the world are hashing out gradual and clear plans to deal with a return to routine under the virus threat, Israel has totally taken its foot off the brakes in one swoop. Nonessential workplaces, stores of all shapes and sizes, nonessential service providers, like hair salons and beauticians — everyone is invited from today.”
- Speaking to Kan, Health Ministry director Moshe Bar Siman-Tov admits at least that opening IKEA was a mistake, because it was miscategorized as a homegoods store.
4. Unhealthy ministry: Bar Siman-Tov has a host more to answer for, with the Health Ministry coming under major fire and even longtime Health Minister Yaakov Litzman looking to get out of Dodge and take over the Housing Ministry instead.
- Israel Hayom leads off its edition with senior doctors accusing the Health Ministry of making bad decisions based on bad statistics.
- “Decisions need to be made according to statistics, not according to whims,” the paper quotes Hagai Levine, chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians, during a discussion on the subject with other top health professionals. “The raw figures pertaining to the coronavirus aren’t accessible to professionals inside the [Health] Ministry or outside it, and they cannot make recommendations about what should be done with them. We could deal with the coronavirus much better.”
- Ynet describes the Health Ministry as “ill” and beset by budget shortfalls and a lack of needed equipment or planning after a decade with Litzman at the helm, who it says is “leaving the ministry in crisis.”
- “Few health professionals will shed tears over Litzman’s departure,” reads its news story.
- In the Orthodox Srugim website, columnist Berla Krombi writes that mumbly Litzman’s problem wasn’t bad management but bad PR: “The evening briefings just didn’t gel with him. The whole show cost him dearly in support from the public, which did not understand what he was saying and why he was taking up precious screen time at 8 at night.”
- Blue and White is reportedly gunning for the ministry with the hopes of placing a technocrat there instead of a politician. But Yedioth’s Yuval Karni writes that the party should put its money where its mouth is and nominate its number 2, former IDF chief Gabi Ashkenazi, for the post, since apparently fighting human enemies is the same as fighting a virus.
- “Ashkenazi is the right candidate for the job. He can storm in and fight a war on the coronavirus and for people’s lives no worse than he did in all other wars,” he writes.
5. Fallen angles: With Memorial Day coming up, news sites are beginning to look at the different ways Israelis are marking the day this year, with cemeteries set to be closed off to avoid overcrowding.
- Visiting the Mount Herzl military cemetery last week, ToI’s Judah Ari Gross found few people visiting graves early and a lot of disappointment.
- “The terraces of graves were largely empty on Thursday morning, with just a small number of individuals, couples and occasionally families ambling through the cemetery. Israel Defense Forces soldiers and teenagers from various youth movements set up tables at the entrances to Mount Herzl, handing out flowers and bottles of water to the visiting bereaved families. The only sounds were birds chirping, wind blowing through the pine trees shadowing the graves, and the faint sounds of playback as production companies worked on the other side of the hill to prepare the sound systems for the national ceremonies that will be held on Memorial and Independence Days,” he writes.
- “It’s all different. The fact that I’m here today alone, that we can’t be together, that we can’t hold each other, that we’re not visiting my mother — it’s different,” says one woman who would normally be at her brother’s graveside in time for 11 a.m. siren on Tuesday but cannot this year.
- Looking at the absurdity of IKEA — everyone’s favorite bogeyman — being open and cemeteries closed, novelist Meir Shalev writes in Yedioth that it’s “infuriating, confusing and suspicious,” referring to a report that Litzman is somehow connected to IKEA’s owners.
- “This is not one hand not knowing what the other is doing, but the exact same hand. The hand that is closing the cemeteries and preventing mourners and memorializers from entering is the same hand that is opening IKEA to shoppers,” he writes.
- Haaretz, though, reports that the shift to online ceremonies will be a boon to an annual commemoration of Combatants for Peace, which brings together bereaved Israelis and Palestinians.
- “Not everyone can attend a ceremony in Tel Aviv. But because everyone is on the internet, we believe that this year we can reach new populations – among Israelis, Palestinians and around the world,” Israeli coordinator Nathan Landau tells the paper’s Allison Kaplan Sommer.
- On Twitter, reporter Noa Landau quips that it also means Israel won’t have the opportunity to block Palestinian activists from attending and right-wingers won’t have the opportunity to stand outside and protest the event.
6. Bodies in the sky: As for the newly deceased, ToI’s Raphael Ahren reports that while most living people can’t fly to Israel, the dead still can for burial, even if they had COVID-19.
- From the start of February 2020 until late April, 100 Israeli citizens and 253 foreigners were brought to Israel from abroad for burial, many of them on specially arranged flights, including 10 Israelis and 45 foreigners who died of the coronavirus, he reports.
- The issue appears to be less health related than bureaucratic, with few flights, high costs and a lot of red tape.
- “The whole thing should have been very smooth — except that it happened during this particular time,” said one Jerusalem resident who managed to bring his father over from the UK to be buried.
- Some living people are still coming to Israel as well, like Almog Sibony, who lives in Miami but flew back to be with his family, and tells Haaretz’s Noa Epstein — who does a weekly column interviewing people at the airport — that if he dies he should at least be buried here.
- But the more interesting story Epstein finds is that of two backpackers trying to find their way out after a month of traipsing around the country trying to find every last hostel that would take them in, and who ended up having some crazy adventures.
- “Instead of bringing equipment she brought a whole group. That Michael guy drove up wildly with psychedelic rock music blaring and said, ‘Get in, we’ll find stuff to burn!’ I went with him and we found garbage we could burn, and we got back and spent the night with a few drinks. It was nice, all in all,” one of them says (and the quote only makes slightly more sense in context.)
- Epstein’s work is cut out for her, with barely anyone coming in and out of the airport. One airport official tells Channel 13 news that “we used to have 5,000 passengers an hour. Now we have had 5,000 all of” April.
- But that may be changing soon with Wizz Air announcing it will fly from London and Vienna to Tel Aviv starting next month.
- And there’s more, according to Globes, which reports that “British Airways has already announced it is restarting London Heathrow – Tel Aviv flights on May 1 and Air Canada is restarting flights between Tel Aviv and Toronto and Montreal in May and June. Delta is restarting Tel Aviv-New York flights. United Airlines, which continued to operate Tel Aviv-New York flights throughout the coronavirus crisis is also reintroducing Tel Aviv-San Francisco flights.”
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April 26, 2020 at 04:11PM
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Looking for an opening: 6 things to know for April 26 - The Times of Israel
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