Yediot Aharonot comments on yesterday’s Cabinet decision to allow approximately 800 children of illegal foreign workers to stay in Israel, but to deport approximately 400 others, and says that „Somebody has gone off the rails. The State of Israel has bombed nuclear reactors, gone to Entebbe, wasted billions on light and regular railways that do not go and paid millions of shekels over the years to people who have not contributed even one drop of sweat to the state and now, 400 children, that is what will ‘kill’ us? Are you crazy?” The author reminds his readers that one of the late Menachem Begin’s first acts as prime minister was to accept a group of Vietnamese boat people: „The result? The whole world applauded.”
Ma’ariv refers to Chelsea Clinton’s recent wedding to the Jewish Marc Mezvinsky and says that „On the one hand, Judaism in America has become a fashionable and non-threatening religion. On the other hand, there is genuine concern over its accelerated disappearance through inter-marriage.”
Yisrael Hayom discusses fate of the Jordan Valley in the peace negotiations with the Palestinians and asserts that „Only full Israeli sovereignty over the entire Jordan Valley, as a security zone resting on the Jordan River as a border, would afford us security in a peace agreement.” The author reminds his readers that, „Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in his last Knesset speech, which he gave in October 1995, said that in any peace agreement, Israel had to keep the Jordan Valley ‘in the broadest sense of the term,” and calls on the Government to invest in the Jordan Valley upon the expiry of the temporary suspension of construction in Judea and Samaria.
The Jerusalem Post discusses Hamas’ violent reto the Arab League’s decision to permit the Palestinian Authority to enter direct negotiations with Israel, and notes that „Hamas’s renewal of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians in the South is an attempt to snuff out any faint new chance of progress toward a peaceful settlement to the conflict, and instead to advance the option of armed struggle.”
Haaretz discusses the role of centralization in the Israeli economy, which is dominated by about 20 financial groups, and states that „Centralization harms competition, development, growth and the public welfare. It also leads to high prices and mediocre service in the absence of competition.”
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