Flatten the lockdown: 6 things to know for April 24

1. Open sesame, open sesayou: Well the war is over and it seems like Israel won. After a few weeks of staying inside (kind of) and self-righteously scolding the ultra-Orthodox for refusing to act just like them, the country, its caretaker leadership and mainstream press are pushing harder than ever for the country to open back up, and fast.

• “About to go back to normal,” reads the main front page headline in tabloid Israel Hayom, reporting on a meeting that it assumed would have taken place and given its rubber stamp by the time its edition hit the once-again busy streets.
• In actuality, the meeting was pushed off until the morning, though that does not stop other news sites Friday morning from acting as if everything is already a done deal.
• Kan, whose reporter Michael Shemesh is seemingly no longer being allowed to listen in on the telephone cabinet meetings (or not reporting quotes directly from them in real time), reports that ministers are looking to open as many “street stores” (i.e. everything but malls or big box stores) as possible.
• “Here’s a list of businesses allowed to open,” reads a top headline on Channel 12 news’s website, despite the fact that no decision has been made and only adding to the confusion that it itself has criticized and blamed the Health Ministry for.
• While most other news sites are at least sure to mention in the fine print the fact that they are working off of a preliminary draft, the Ynet news site goes one further, reporting that a decision has already been made to open pretty much any store outside of malls, including restaurants for takeout.
• The report does not bother citing a source, naturally, and of course no official announcement has been made on any new regulations.

2. Fuzzy wuzzy was a ministry mathematician: Channel 12 news reports that “the numbers prove the virus is slowing, there are fewer deaths, and fewer people on ventilators,” citing official stats.

• Walla reports that there has been only one person confirmed with COVID-19 in Tel Aviv in the last three days, going off an official city by city report of places with a population of over 5,000, put out by the Health Ministry that others also report on uncritically.
• The only problem? The math in the document is about as solid as a marshmallow. The figures account for only about half of the approximately 700 new cases reported in the last three days, which would mean there is a massive unaccounted for outbreak in rural areas. But in collated figures for all small towns, the ministry claims that in the last four days, the cumulative number of people who had the virus actually went down, which is physically impossible without somehow creating a rip in the space-time continuum.
• Army Radio reporter Daron Kadosh, looking at another version of the same document, notes that it counted over 33,000 cases in Jerusalem, i.e. more than double the total amount confirmed in Israel — likely the result of an editing error.
• In the past the ministry, which is Israel’s only source of official information on virus figures, has put out, and then erased, other wacky numbers, like reporting the other day that 18 people died in a single afternoon.

3. Schmear campaign, or hold the locks? Math is one thing the Health Ministry should be good at. In a hit piece looking at director-general Moshe Bar Siman-Tov, Yedioth describes him as a ruthless and powerful bureaucrat, slashing budgets (including the Health Ministry’s, which he thought would find ways to be more efficient in times of “hunger”), shutting down the country based on questionable science and pulling the strings of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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• Mobileye founder Amnon Shashua, who is advising the government on opening the economy and thought upped testing could allow people at lower risk to leave the lockdown but was shot down by the ministry, tells the paper that “there is an atmosphere of fear there, which sits well with the decision makers we have right now, and that’s what the framework is built around. We’re getting numbers that there will be an apocalypse where 100,000 will die, but it’s not backed up by anything we know about. It’s a framework that is risk averse, with massive safety precautions, which is leading to irrelevant conclusions,” he says.
• But in Haaretz, Ravit Hecht defends Bar Siman-Tov and says Israelis are being too quick to throw caution to the wind and throw out good policies that helped shield it from coronavirus storm.
• “Senior Health Ministry officials are being attacked now only because the number of victims to date hasn’t risen to the shocking levels of some European countries and the United States. In other words, they’re being punished precisely because they may have done the right thing,” she writes.
• Israel Hayom’s Ran Reznik writes that the ministry is not doing a good enough job being transparent and communicating with the public to explain its decisions, leading to “a very worrying and dangerous misconception that the danger has already passed.”

4. The Hemnes and the Hemnes-nots: The push for a return to our normal consumerist hellscapes comes courtesy of a populist (and mostly justified) push in the name of business owners large and small who just want to get back to making falafels/massive margins on China-made toys that cost a fraction of the price anywhere else.

• Most galling to many is the opening of the Ikea furniture superstore or other seemingly random decisions and uneven enforcement.
• “We’ve been telling people every day that we can’t serve them,” Jerusalem coffee shop owner Brandon Treger tells ToI’s Jessica Steinberg. “We stuck to the rules even though our neighbors opened.”
• Pickle man Eli Malka, a fixture at Jerusalem’s open air Mahane Yehuda market, or shuk, for 40 years, tells Channel 12 news he’s depressed, and incensed he can’t open when others can.
• “They opened lottery booths, to allow people to gamble, to kill them and their social security money. That’s what’s needed to open the lottery now? People are broken and don’t have enough to eat. Why is the lotto open and the shuk not.”
• Israel Hayom reports that one man who helps design signs for Ikea wrote on Facebook that “any business owner that’s imploded, you should open. If you want an Ikea sign, I’ll make one for you. Anarchy now!”

5. Baby it’s virusy outside: Not everybody is down to start running around again, and some plan on staying in no matter what the government allows to open:

• “Israelis Act as if the Coronavirus Crisis Is Over, and It’s a Dangerous Illusion,” reads a headline in Haaretz.
• “The tremendous economic hardship and people’s exhaustion with being stuck between four walls are giving rise to layers upon layers of rationalizations that play down the dangers of the epidemic,” writes the paper’s Amos Harel.
• Health Ministry deputy director-general Itamar Grotto, who days ago told reporters that the virus had seemed to play itself out, now tells Army Radio that reopening schools will cause the number of sick to shoot back up again.
• “The more they open, the more I will stay away,” tweets Ynet journalist Atilla Somfalvi. “I’ll keep cutting my own hair, going around with a mask and keeping meters or more from anyone else, at least for the next two weeks.”
  In the US, as well, JTA reports that synagogues are being allowed to reopen, but are not going for it.
• “We are very sensitive to the fact that people are being economically impacted by the closures, but we’re more concerned about the possible loss of life if there’s a second wave so soon,” Atlanta-area rabbi Joshua Heller is quoted telling the agency.

6. Kids in the halls of power: The quickly coalescing government coalition is also seen as needing to slow its roll, amid a series of court challenges questioning the legitimacy of a whole raft of things it wants to do.

• ToI’s Haviv Rettig Gur notes that among the most troubling and legally dubious clauses, which the coalition wants to legislate into laws, will essentially neuter the Knesset’s ability to legislate or hold no-confidence votes.
• “The Knesset loses the power to unseat a prime minister, loses the power of the purse since it can no longer hold up the state budget — loses even the power of legislation itself,” he writes.
• In Walla, Tal Shalev doubts there will be legislating happening anyway, comparing the Netanyahu-Gantz government to the two-headed Pushmi-Pullyu Llama from the Dr. Dolittle children’s book: “The tensions ahead of the court hearings will be just a taste of the future life together between those who are determined to ‘defend democracy,’ and those who want to put limits on the court,” she writes.
• It’s a different pair of kids characters Haaretz’s Yossi Verter has in mind. Verter writes that the reason Blue and White head Benny Gantz went for the deal instead of pushing ahead with threatened legislation that would disqualify Netanyahu from being prime minister, was that two of his MKs, Tzvi Hauser and Yoaz Hendel, refused to commit to supporting the bill.
• In return for saving him, Verter writes, Netanyahu agreed to change campaign finance laws to allow the pair, who defected for Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem faction to join up, to get public money they would normally not be entitled to.
• “This fictive faction of seat stealers, which broke off from a party that never even ran independently in elections, is scooping up millions of shekels from the public coffers,” he writes. “But in these times of great waste, when money for ministers comes ahead of funding for the sinking economy, what’s a few million for the Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum of the new coalition.”