PM on trial as parties endorse him to form gov’t ‘The accused abused power to hand out illegal benefits’
Prosecutor Liat Ben Ari outlines charges at opening hearing
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abused his executive power to hand out illegal benefits as part of a wide-ranging media bribery scheme, the prosecution charged Monday at the opening hearing of the Israeli leader’s public corruption trial.
Prosecutor Liat Ben Ari said Netanyahu “abused his power to give illegal benefits in coordination with central media outlets to further his personal interests.”
“Everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, and all people are equal before the court and the judges: the great and the small, the rich and the poor, the powerful and the simple,” she said.
Ben Ari said the case was one of the gravest in Israel’s history.
In response, Netanyahu said the prosecution “improperly used law-enforcement power” as part of a “witch hunt. They did not interrogate or probe for crimes; they probed for a specific person: me.”
Netanyahu said he is “someone who bears the flag of the rule of law” and therefore “arrived at the court to listen to the prosecution,” but was disappointed by what he characterized as abusing the law to try to topple him at all costs.
As an example, he said, the prosecution had ignored “not just any law, but a Basic Law requiring receiving approval from the attorney-general to open a criminal probe” against the prime minister.
Earlier in the day at the Jerusalem District Court, Ben Ari said the question for the court was not whether the articles at the Walla media outlet were done objectively or were balanced at a given moment, but rather what the illegal influence
before President Reuven Rivlin that Netanyahu should be tasked with forming the next government and standing at its head – was the equivalent of an ant crawling across a watch on
one of Dali’s canvases.
Of all history’s great artists, Dali would have done the most justice to Monday’s events in Jerusalem, because the images the nation watched on one split television screen did not seem to fit logically or flow one from the other as one might have expected.
Yet here we are: Israeli politics as a surrealistic painting.
Netanyahu is not the first public figure to go on trial in Israel in recent memory.
Within the space of just over a decade, Israel followed with bated breath the trials of former president Moshe Katsav, former prime minister Ehud Olmert and former chief rabbi Yona Metzger – all of whom ended up going to prison. It is nothing new for this country to see its most celebrated figures as defendants in court.
But “former” is the operative word in the cases involving Katsav, Olmert and Metzger. They were all “former” officials of the highest rank, well out of office when their trials began.
In Netanyahu’s case, however, not only is he still in office, but at the same time that former Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua began to testify against the prime minister, Rivlin was hearing arguments from various parties as to why Netanyahu should be tasked yet again with forming a government, ensuring that he will remain in office.
When Katsav, Olmert and Metzger showed up in court, it was clear that their public careers were behind them. Not so for Netanyahu.
This is one reason why in addition to the adjectives “sad” and “proud” that were routinely trotted out in the past to describe the day when one of the country leaders appeared in court – “sad” because a leader of the country was accused of a crime; “proud” because it showed that in Israel’s democracy no one was above the law – this time, another adjective can be thrown into the mix: bizarre.
Bizarre because the defendant is not only still prime minister, but the country has not turned him out of office over the last four elections even though it knew very well what the charges against him were. Bizarre because he may very well continue in that position. This either reveals a nation enthralled by its leader or one that does not trust its judicial system. Or both.
One of the most striking features of Yeshua’s testimony against Netanyahu was the degree to which the actors being discussed are still very much central players in this country’s political dramas and all are interconnected and interacting with one another.
Yeshua testified that in 2013 he received instructions from the Netanyahu family to run stories critical of Naftali Bennett and Ayalet Shaked, then the leaders of the Bayit Yehudi Party, in order to smear them and their families and bring them down a peg prior to that year’s elections.
That, of course, would be the same Bennett and Shaked, now the leaders of the Yamina Party, which Netanyahu is currently courting furiously so that he can form a government and – maybe, just maybe – avert a continuation of his trial.
That is more ironic than surrealistic, though, in all great works of surrealism, there is often more than just a touch of irony. •