Arutz Sheva's Shimon Cohen analyzes some of the passing week's news items, as spun by Israeli mainstream media.
"The Source” (“HaMakor”), the investigative news show on Channel 10 hosted by journalists Ofer Shelach and Raviv Drucker, finally dealt with some of the questions that have piled up since the Rabin assassination. The show aired two reports: one showed previously unseen footage from convicted assassin Yigal Amir's interrogation after the murder, as well as the re-enactment, and interviews with the men who interrogated Amir. The second interviewed Shai Glazer, a member of Rabin's Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) security detail on that fateful night.
On the face of it, what we have here is a respectable investigative program which looks into the information and announces decisively that the conspiracy theories about the murder are groundless. But it may be too early to breathe a sigh of relief on this matter. 
Assuming former Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar – who chaired the original commission of inquiry on the Rabin murder – saw the show, and assuming his report on the murder reflected what he knew at the time and was not meant to trick the nation, he will probably realize that someone must have tricked him, 14 years ago.
One substantial fact that was established in Shelach and Drucker's show that the judge needs to be aware of relates to the shouts of “dummy bullets!, dummy bullets!” that eyewitnesses heard at the scene of the assassination. These shouts have led to much speculation and fed theories that pointed to some kind of Shin Bet complicity in the assassination.
In the interview on “The Source,” Shin Bet interrogator Ofer Gamliel said, on camera, that he himself questioned the man who shouted out these words. He knows who it was and says it is a security man, whose name he cannot state for security reasons.
On the face of it, this is a slap in the face of the conspiracy theorists. But Judge Shamgar will remember that he himself wrote in his report that “we were unable to establish the identity of the shouter with certainty.”
What does this mean? It means that not all of the facts were brought before the honorable judge, or that someone tricked him.
And there is another question that was reopened by the show. Former Shin Bet man Glazer told The Source that he lifted Rabin into his car together with the commander of the Shin Bet detail, Yoram Rubin, and that this was a difficult thing to do because Rabin was obviously not trying to make it easier for the Shin Bet men to lift him. But Rubin told the Shamgar Commission the opposite: that Rabin cooperated with the men who lifted him into the car.
So maybe, your honor, it is time to reopen the discussion, with all of the questions and information that piled up in the last 14 years?
What Do They Care?
In an interview with Haaretz, veteran journalist Rino Tzror told of the moments in which he decided to leave Channel 10, and in doing so gave us a peek into the way the channel – which was hailed as the harbinger of a new kind of news media – regarded the uprooting of communities from Gush Katif in 2005.
Tzror speaks of those days as days of a great crisis, when he took his camera and some clothes and went to Gush Katif to document the painful events. The moment that led to his break with Channel 10 had to do with the girls' prayer on the last day of the expulsion, at the synagogue in Neve Dekalim. Tzror joined the girls and documented the drama, the high point of which was the emotional Tfila La'Ani Ki Yaatof prayer.
He wanted to air 40 minutes of that day's footage on his program. “I wanted to give the film to the people of the Gush and say to them: 'You are cool. We are locked in a piercing dispute but you are cool and you are my brothers.' And the world needs to understand what I understood, I need that to happen. I showed the footage to Moodi and he said: 'Who is interested in this? Girls crying.' When he said that, I understood that a river had passed between us.”
"Moodi” is Moodi Friedman, Director of Channel 10. And now we understand how the Expulsion was viewed in the corridors of Channel 10: 'Girls crying, who cares?'
The same Channel 10 is now up for sale in a tender, after years of being repeatedly bailed out from its financial woes by the government. The Israeli public, how surprising, is apparently not crazy about the channel's current contents. Will the businessman who can turn it into Israel's Fox News please stand up?
One More About Rino Tzror
In his program on IDF Army Radio, Tzror interviewed Social Services Minister Yitzchak Herzog and discussed the proposed splitting of the Attorney General's powers. As the two were talking, the following sentence left his lips: “Do you, too, like us, members of the media, see this stance taken by Minister Ne'eman's as a personal matter?”
Thank you Mr. Tzror, for articulating on the air what so many of us have felt: that the media has taken a clear stand in this debate. It is opposed to Minister Ne'eman's initiative to split the A-G's authority and favors the current judicial dictatorship.
In this context, Ben Caspit of Ma'ariv deserves a citation of courage. Here is some of what the senior journalist wrote in his column:
"This is a struggle for the soul of Israel's democracy; for the public's right to choose and determine its fate. The judicial elite in Israel does not give a hoot about our democracy. The friends from Rechavia [the posh Jerusalem neighborhood where many members of the judicial elite live – ed.] do not like the idea that masses of people, ordinary people, will elect the representatives who will run the country. The will of the people? Don't make them laugh. The people have not learned, they have not been educated. It is irresponsible to allow masses of simple people, working people, to go to the ballots and determine our destiny. This is a task for the select few.”
Caspit went on to describe a “dictatorship” that refused to accept the results of the national elections since 1977 and named its founder as former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak. At least two other prominent journalists did the same in their columns, prompting some optimists in nationalist circles to speculate that perhaps, something important was happening before their very eyes.