Opinion | Bibi on Trial or on Stage?

On December 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stand to defend himself in Case 67104-01-20, in which he has been charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

It has been eight years since the investigation against him began, five years since he was indicted and four since the trial began. Until now, Netanyahu has rarely appeared in court, but he is now scheduled to testify on his own behalf three full days a week for at least five weeks.

The trial pertains to three cases, all of which deal with Netanyahu’s alleged cultivation of relations, for personal and political benefit, with a number of rich men who either owned or had influence over key media outlets. Netanyahu is Israel’s first-ever serving prime minister to be criminally indicted and the first to take the witness stand in his own defense. (Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was indicted and ultimately convicted for corruption, but he resigned before his trial began.)

Yet, judging from his behavior in and out of court, Netanyahu is making every attempt to flip the script and put the entire legal system and his political opposition on a show trial for the public.

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At a televised press conference on December 9, a belligerent and defiant Netanyahu ranted against the investigations and the legal system that indicted him, referring to the entire process as a witch hunt and an attempt by leftist elites to undermine the right’s victory in the 2022 elections.

Netanyahu rarely holds live press conferences, preferring taped statements, and even more rarely allows for questions. But in response to journalists’ questions, he went on the attack.

“How much fake news can you make up?” he thundered at a journalist from Kan, the public broadcasting station. “I’ve listened enough to your lies. Now listen to the truth.” To another journalist he retorted, “You listen to me!… the Israeli public…hears these lies.”

Netanyahu claimed that he wanted to go on the witness stand, and that he has been waiting for eight years (since the beginning of the investigations), “to present the truth…to puncture for good the wild and ridiculous accusations against me.”

Yet Netanyahu and his lawyers have made every effort possible to postpone his testimony. He has frequently asked for delays; the last request, for an infinite postponement, said that he could not spare the time because he needed to manage the war. The three-judge panel agreed to a nearly six-month postponement; when that time was up, he asked for another two-and-a-half months, but this time, the judges refused.

Netanyahu asked the General Security Service (responsible for internal security) to provide an official opinion that he could not testify due to security considerations, but they refused. The three-panel court, however, did agree to move the hearings from the district court in Jerusalem to the newer courthouse in Tel Aviv, where the security is presumed to be better. Only days before the trial, several cabinet members called the attorney general and asked her to postpone Netanyahu’s testimony because of the situation in Syria. She, too, refused and reprimanded the ministers for what she referred to as their “political interference.”

The trial consists of three cases. In Case 4000, Netanyahu is alleged to have traded valuable government regulatory concessions to the telecom giant Bezeq in return for favorable news coverage on the Walla news website, which Bezeq owned at the time. During the period in question, Bezeq’s controlling shareholder was Shaul Elovitch, a co-defendant in the case. In Case 2000, Netanyahu is alleged to have attempted to negotiate favorable news coverage with co-defendant Arnon Mozes, publisher of the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, in exchange for government policy that would have benefitted the newspaper. In Case 1000, Netanyahu is accused of fraud and breach of trust over gifts, including expensive cigars and champagne, he allegedly received from Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan and Australian billionaire James Packer. 

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On December 10, supporters and opponents of Netanyahu arrived early in the morning and stood on opposite sidewalks outside the courthouse, separated by the police. Although the crowd of supporters, numbering about 200, was raucous and noisy, a police officer told me that the crowd was much smaller than expected. They all carried identical, professionally printed signs, one reading “Persecution and conspiracies,” and the other claiming that “The legal clique is undermining our security.”  

Across the street stood several dozen opponents of Netanyahu. They were mostly family members of the hostages still in captivity in Gaza, and they carried handwritten signs demanding that Netanyahu bring their loved ones home immediately.

Netanyahu’s supporters cursed his opponents. Likud activist Rami Ben Yehuda screamed at the family members, “We have suffered from your sick leftist delusions for years!” When he recognized Danny Elgarat, the brother of hostage Itzhak Elgarat, Ben Yehuda called him a piece of filth and a rag.

As he walked into the courtroom, MK Almog Cohen (from the far-right Otzma Yehudit party) addressed the crowds, saying it is not the prime minister who is on the witness stand. “We are all standing on the witness stand,” he shouted. “And we won’t let anyone run over us anymore. We will not let this left-wing junta of judges rule over us and deprive us of our prime minister.”

Transportation Minister Miri Regev, also a Netanyahu stalwart, muttered that the judges were a “mafia,” while MK Tali Gotlieb hissed, “Disgrace!” and Domestic Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared that the trial was “a persecution.”

Seating inside the courtroom is limited; besides journalists, only MKs and cabinet ministers were allowed in to observe. About a dozen of them sat on the front benches, acting like a cheering squad as Netanyahu came in. Indeed, the hearings were delayed by about 20 minutes until two MKs agreed to leave because there was not enough room for all of them to sit down.

Netanyahu’s lawyer delivered a long  opening statement in which he continued the theme that the legal system had oppressed his client. When Netanyahu finally took the stand, he too delivered a very long speech, surveying the changes in the Middle East since the Sykes-Pico Agreement of 1916.  He told the stories of his grandfather and father and his brother, Yoni Netanyahu, killed in the Entebbe rescue mission in 1976. He mentioned all of the wonderful changes that he has brought to the region, including taking credit for  the recent fall of Syrian President Bashir al-Assad. Yet Israel, he said pointedly, still faces great challenges, implying that only he is qualified to lead Israel to victory.

As if to emphasize how crucial Netanyahu is to the war effort, his aides approached the witness stand several times, passing him notes. At one point, the trial was briefly paused to allow him to deal with what he said was an urgent matter.

“There needs to be a balance between the necessities of the trial—which I appreciate—and the necessities of the country,” the prime minister said of the passed notes.

And on Monday, only his third day of testimony, Netanyahu’s lawyers once again asked to postpone his testimony; after hearing his lawyers in closed chambers, the judges agreed to cancel Tuesday’s sessions, spiking rumors throughout the country that a hostage deal may be imminent.

If this were the United States, one might assume that Netanyahu was playing to the jury—but Israel does not have a jury system, leaving this journalist with the impression that he was speaking less to defend himself and more for the benefit of his base constituency, who, since the proceedings are not televised, see only snippets and quotes reported by the media. He made every effort to present himself as a great statesman and the events described in the indictment and, indeed, the entire legal procedure, as petty, “ridiculous” and totally beneath a man of his stature.

To emphasize this, Netanyahu presented to the court a somewhat clumsy and obviously staged videotape, in which he signs documents without reading them. “Does anyone think I have time to read everything I must sign?” he asked rhetorically. “For this I count on my assistants and advisers,” intimating that if he did sign documents that could support the allegations against him, he did so unknowingly and unwittingly.

Since Case 1000 centers on illicit gifts of cigars and champagne, Netanyahu told the court, “I work 17-18 hours a day. I eat my lunch at my desk…I usually go to sleep at around 1 or 2 in the morning and have almost no time to see family or children…Now and then, I sin with a cigar, which I can’t smoke at length because I’m always in meetings and briefings… By the way, I loathe champagne.”

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Filming and picture-taking are forbidden in the courtroom, leaving Israeli news stations to come up with some original ideas for their audiences. After Netanyahu’s second day of testimony, the i24 television station was forced to apologize for airing an AI-generated image depicting the prime minister in a glass cage eerily reminiscent of the one that held Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. 

It remains to be seen if Netanyahu and his lawyers will find additional ways to postpone or prolong his testimony. And even if he is eventually convicted, he is most likely to appeal. Under Israeli law, he would be required to resign only after a final judgment rendered by Israel’s Supreme Court. That could take a minimum of another few years.

It thus also remains to be seen if the trial against Netanyahu will continue to divide the Israeli public and undermine its belief in the State of Israel’s legal system.

Top image: Bibi on trial ( gov.il / U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jack Sanders/U.S. Secretary of Defense).