Netanyahu doth protest too much?

Well, did he or didn’t he?

For those of you who have been following, JTA’s story about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling Jerusalem Post editor Steve Linde "We have two main enemies…. The New York Times and Haaretz” has caused quite a stir.

Our news item was based on a recording we obtained of a speech Linde gave Wednesday in Tel Aviv. By the time we reported it on Wednesday evening in New York, it was too late to get response from Jerusalem. But as soon as Israel woke up Thursday morning, our phones began ringing off the hook with calls from the Prime Minister’s Office denying the report, and Netanyahu reiterated his denial in a meeting Thursday with the Dutch Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee.

Linde quickly backtracked a bit — saying part of his remarks were an interpretation of his conversation weeks earlier with the prime minister and that they were taken out of context — but in interviews Thursday with me and others he stood by the most damning part of the quote.

At Haaretz, the news was taken as a badge of honor. Columnist (and former Knesset member) Yossi Sarid wrote, "Were [Netanyahu] not in the habit of denying so much – not a day goes by without clarifications and denials – we might have believed him more. With so many ducks in the pond, it’s hard not to hear them quacking from the prime minister’s office." Carlo Strenger wrote a tongue-in-cheek column suggesting that Netanyahu’s commitment to democracy isn’t as strong as his personal predilections.

As of Thursday evening the Times still hadn’t weighed in, but bloggers from The Atlantic’s John Hudson to Shmuel Rosner of the L.A. Jewish Journal were busy dissecting what the remark says about the inner workings of the prime minister’s mind.

Here’s the original, full quote from Linde’s speech to the Women’s International Zionist Organization conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday:

"Let me share with you something that Prime Minister Netanyahu said to me in a meeting a couple of weeks ago. I hope he won’t be mad at me because it may have been off the record. I walked in at his office in Tel Aviv, and he said, ‘You know, Steve, we have two main enemies.’ And I thought he was going to talk about, you know, Iran, maybe Hamas. He said, ‘It’s The New York Times and Haaretz.’ He said they set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories, as Irwin [Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister who was part of the WIZO panel with Linde] said, on what they read in The New York Times or Haaretz. And we said to him, Prime Minister, do you really think the media has that strong a role in shaping [inaudible] opinion about Israel? And he said, ‘Absolutely.’"