Citizens are innocent until proven guilty, but Prime Ministers are not mere citizens. According to Israeli law, Prime Ministers need not resign unless they are convicted of a serious crime. But precedent holds that Prime Ministers should not serve if they are merely indicted—that, once indicted, they cannot both prepare a legal defense and properly do their job. In 1977, Yitzhak Rabin resigned from his first term when it was discovered that his wife, Leah, had maintained an illegal, though paltry, foreign bank account after he served as Ambassador to Washington. In 2008, Ehud Olmert announced that he would resign before being indicted for having taken bribes when he was the mayor of Jerusalem. “I will step aside properly in an honorable and responsible way, and afterwards I will prove my innocence,” Olmert said. (He was eventually exonerated on the original charges, though he served more than a year in prison after a retrial for breach of trust and witness tampering, which he denied.)
Yesterday, after a yearlong investigation, the Israeli police recommended that the Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on various counts of bribery. Netanyahu has responded with defiance, attacking the integrity of the police and implicitly exhorting Mandelblit, whom he appointed, to disregard the recommendations. “Nothing will have sway and nothing will sway me, not even the incessant attacks against me,” Netanyahu said. Indeed, his defiance has been building for some time. Last summer, as one investigation seemed to climax, Netanyahu, sounding eerily like Donald Trump, told a rally of three thousand supporters in Tel Aviv that the left and “the fake-news media” were engaged “in an obsessive, unprecedented witch hunt against me and my family.” They constituted “a massive and united chorus faintheartedly urging withdrawal from territories in our homeland.” The crowd broke out singing, “Bibi, King of Israel!” Oren Hazan, a Likud member of the Knesset, called the state prosecutor’s office “a stable that’s full of crap.”
The first case in the recommendations, known as Case 1000, concerns Netanyahu allegedly receiving almost three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gifts from the Israeli-born Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and the Australian businessman James Packer. (The gifts are said to have included pricey cigars and champagne.) The quo for the quid, allegedly, was Netanyahu’s lobbying for a law that would extend the period in which Israelis returning to Israel after living abroad could enjoy a tax holiday. (Both men deny that the gifts were intended as bribes.) The erstwhile finance minister whom Netanyahu lobbied—and whose testimony is an integral part of the police case—was Yair Lapid, the head of the opposition Yesh Atid Party, and currently Netanyahu’s chief rival. At the same time, Netanyahu allegedly lobbied then Secretary of State John Kerry to extend Milchan’s U.S. visa, and helped Milchan with investments in Israeli television.
The second case, Case 2000, involves Netanyahu’s alleged effort to secure more flattering coverage from the mass-circulation tabloid Yediot Aharonot by suggesting to its publisher, Arnon Mozes, that he would hamper the growth of Israel Hayom, a rival tabloid owned by a Netanyahu ally, the American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. (Adelson reportedly told the police, last year, that Netanyahu had tried to persuade him to back off from plans to expand Israel Hayom.) From its start, in 2007, Israel Hayom has attacked Netanyahu’s opponents; by 2014, Adelson allegedly had lost as much as two hundred million dollars on the newspaper. That Netanyahu could presume to scale it back without alienating Adelson might suggest that the paper could be considered an undeclared foreign campaign contribution, which contravenes Israeli election law. But the police ignored that line of inquiry, sticking to the more provable charge.
The cases are hardly airtight. “The problem is proving intention of wrong doing, mens rea, the premeditated giving-and-getting specific benefits,” Frances Raday, a professor emerita of law at Hebrew University, told me. On the whole, the charges in Case 2000 should be easier to prove, since recordings of conversations between Netanyahu and Mozes have been found on the cell phone of Netanyahu’s former chief of staff Ari Harow, who, last summer, signed a plea deal and became a state witness. “The police are recommending that Mandelblit indict Milchan as well, presumably in the hope that Milchan will flip the way Harow did,” Raday said.
Nor have the police been able to close in on their target without having to endure vague charges of political animus. The force’s commander, Roni Alsheikh, made his career in the secret service, the Shin Bet. Last week, on Israel’s most-watched news-magazine show, he disclosed that Netanyahu had told him at the time of his appointment—after the investigations were launched—that he would be promoted to head the Shin Bet if Netanyahu remained Prime Minister. This was an effort to secure his loyalty, Alsheikh suggested. He also said that members of his team have come under surveillance by unnamed private investigators. These disclosures might reinforce a perception that Netanyahu is capable of abuse of power. Netanyahu, however, claimed that the interview was proof of police bias against him. One Likud minister, Gilad Erdan, now wants Mandelblit to investigate Alsheikh’s claims before rendering a decision on Netanyahu.
Still, there is an air of desperation about Netanyahu’s defiance. For the past two months, anti-corruption demonstrators, numbering in the tens of thousands, have marched in Tel Aviv virtually every Saturday night. Netanyahu is a master of media, but he is in danger of losing control of the narrative. For several hours on Wednesday afternoon, Israel Hayom’s online headline quoted, as it rarely has, Yair Lapid’s tough response to attacks from Netanyahu and his supporters: “This is the way criminals talk.” Looming in the background, finally, is another investigation, suggesting a conflict of interest in defense procurement so brazen that it has alienated key Army officers and intelligence strategists who once stood with Netanyahu.
This investigation, known as Case 3000, concerns alleged interference in the Defense Ministry’s acquisition of submarines and other vessels, worth more than two billion dollars, from the German contractor ThyssenKrupp. (I wrote about it last year, in another context.) The company’s Israeli agent is now coöperating with the investigation; Netanyahu’s second cousin and personal attorney, David Shimron, and his legal partner Yitzhak Molcho, Netanyahu’s friend and adviser, have also been questioned in the investigation. (Both men have denied any wrongdoing.)
Netanyahu claims to have been unaware of any profiteering by associates. But his twenty-six-year-old son, Yair, inadvertently made his claim of being above influence peddling an object of ridicule when, last month, a recording emerged of Yair, after a night of drinking at a Tel Aviv strip club, in 2015, asking a friend, the son of the natural-gas tycoon Kobi Maimon, to lend him money. Maimon stands to profit from legislation that Netanyahu helped broker governing distribution of revenues from gas fields off the Israeli coast. “Bro,” Yair said, “my Dad just got you a twenty-billion-dollar deal and you can’t spot me four hundred shekels?” Netanyahu has also been chastised by the state controller for looking the other way in 2015, when his friend Shaul Elovitch—the chairman and major shareholder of the telecom giant Bezeq, a public company—sold an Elovitch-owned satellite-content provider to Bezeq at an allegedly inflated price. Netanyahu was acting as Communications Minister at the time; Elovitch had reportedly been in debt. Bezeq also owns Walla!, a popular news Web site that has steadily supported Netanyahu and Likud.
Given the political atmospherics produced by these scandals, Netanyahu has no play left other than to double down on the ideological right and hope that the cases against him can be dragged out, while his coalition partners, for want of alternatives, stay in line. He may succeed, but his immediate fate is in the hands of politicians, not judges. “In the coming days, they will have to explain to the public why they still support a corrupt leader who preaches corruption in prime time,” the Haaretz editor Aluf Benn writes.
The linchpin of the coalition majority, Moshe Kahlon, the Finance Minister and leader of the centrist Kulanu Party, is insisting that he must wait for the Attorney General to “make decisions regarding filing or not filing an indictment.” Yet he called “on everyone, on the left and the right, to stop attacking the police and the legal system,” which he said must be allowed to operate “in an orderly, professional and levelheaded manner.” Kahlon has run as a champion of economic fairness, especially for North African immigrant families like his own. He may find it difficult to stay in Netanyahu’s camp now that the Labor Party is led by Avi Gabbay, who shares Kahlon’s Mizrahi origins and is appealing to the same voters. Gabbay, for his part, welcomed the police recommendations and proclaimed the “end of the Netanyahu era.”
That era may not be coming to an end, but, if it is, this may be what the beginning of the end looks like. It is hard to see how Netanyahu regains his footing without kicking at institutions that most Israelis still value. “Bibi seems to be over,” Olmert told me on Wednesday. “But it will take time, it will be ugly. The Netanyahus will fight. This is their life.”
