Israel braces for wild election amid Netanyahu flap
JERUSALEM — Israelis were confronted with a rude new reality Friday: a prime minister running for re-election while facing indictment for corruption.
While there were hints that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could be losing support, his right-wing allies appeared to be sticking with him, and no one was foolish enough to write off a politician who still retains a strong base and has shown Houdini-like skill in escaping seemingly impossible jams before.
The only certainty was that Israel was in for a wild ride between now and the April 9 ballot, with analysts predicting that the country’s political scene — loud, fractious and heated at the best of times — would become only more divisive as Mr. Netanyahu, who is seeking a fourth consecutive term, fights for his political life.
“He splits the nation,” said Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert in public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “His are the politics of polarization and exaggeration. If he got any more polarizing he’d fall off the planet.”
Mr. Netanyahu, who has dominated the Israeli political scene for a decade, faces a serious challenge from a newcomer, Benny Gantz, a retired military chief and leader of the new, centrist Blue and White party.
After the announcement by the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, on Thursday that he intends to indict Mr. Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, polls have pointed to a growing shift away from Mr. Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party and toward Mr. Gantz, whose military record could inoculate him against Mr. Netanyahu’s strongest line of attack, that he is the only one who can protect Israel’s security.
Israel Hayom, the free newspaper sympathetic to Mr. Netanyahu and financed by Sheldon Adelson, the American casino billionaire and a longtime patron, buried its own poll in the Friday edition on Page 19, after it put Blue and White a hefty nine seats ahead of Likud.
If anything, experts said, Israel Hayom’s polls have tended to be skewed in Mr. Netanyahu’s favor.
The details of three separate, but interconnected, corruption cases in which Mr. Netanyahu is a suspect were spread over a 57-page document released by the Justice Ministry on Thursday.
It included a chart with a monthly breakdown of the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cigars and Champagne supplied to the Netanyahus by a Hollywood producer and a millionaire businessman; backroom dealings with the publisher of a rival newspaper, Yediot Ahronot; and a dinner with an Israeli telecommunications mogul that led to a yearslong “give and take” relationship, as Mr. Mandelblit put it, with Mr. Netanyahu allegedly exchanging lucrative regulatory favors for positive coverage.
But a deluge of leaks from the investigations over the past few months meant that for most Israelis there was little shock value in the official revelations.