Peloni: Gadi Taub provides a very thorough and extensive look at the Netanyahu trials as he exposes the impossibility of ignoring the rule of law being perverted towards lawfare tactics, as well as the lack of any regard for justice in a regime which claims the judicial supremacy. In their quest to manipulate and unseat Netanyahu, the entire charade of legal abuse and judicial malpractice has exposed itself as being no more than the squandering of power among those ideological quarters which have increasingly been rejected by the Israeli electorate.
Part II of Israeli documentary ‘The Trial’ lays bare the unfolding list of loony fabrications at the heart of the legal offensive against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
by Gadi Taub | July 29, 2025
Binyamin Netanyahu in court during his corruption trial, prior to his third testimony day, seems to be talking with his attorney, Amit Hadad, with his back to the camera. (Photo by Oren Persico, The Seventh Eye – Was sent to me attached to an email, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia)
The trial of Benjamin Netanyahu began in Jerusalem District Court over five years ago, on May 24, 2020. Since that date, Israel has become a different country, one scarred by terror attacks and international condemnation and also boasting stunning military victories. Meanwhile, judges and researchers have cast serious doubt on the evidentiary basis for all four charges against the prime minister, only one of which has of yet been dismissed and none proved in court.
Yet no matter how the world changes, the trial itself marches on, immune to both the global situation and to the quality of the evidence presented in court. Instead, prosecutors regularly compel testimony from the prime minister, often several times a week, and force him to demonstrate that the matters of state for which he is responsible are of greater importance in this or that moment than remembering whether or not his wife might have asked a family friend and political supporter to purchase a Bugs Bunny doll for his son in Manhattan nearly 30 years ago.
Once presented in court, the Bugs Bunny doll instantly became the symbol for all that’s ridiculous about the trial. Oddly, the doll was not even in the original indictment. In fact, the whole episode occurred outside the time frame of the charges. The toy was given as a present to Netanyahu’s son by billionaire Arnon Milchan back in 1996. The prosecutors brought it up in order to create the impression that Milchan, the alleged supplier of Champagne and cigars to the prime minister, was not really a friend but rather a political supplicant who from the get-go tried to ingratiate himself with the newly elected prime minister by bringing him gifts, like the Looney Tunes doll.
The plot then thickened. To establish the alleged greediness of the Netanyahus, the prosecution quoted Milchan saying that Sara Netanyahu had asked for a large Bugs Bunny doll, whereas he intended to bring only a small one. Poor Milchan then had to run around Manhattan in the rain to find the right size doll. But alas, Sara Netanyahu is not on trial, and her husband could not recall any haggling about the size of a toy 30 years ago. So the latest line of questioning intended to demonstrate the corruption of the prime minister achieved little, except to give the trial a new moniker by which to mock it: the Bugs Bunny trial.
Which is not to say that the Netanyahu trial isn’t a very serious matter: It’s the climax of a struggle between two opposing power structures over how Israel is to be governed and by whom. On one side is the machinery of electoral politics, and on the other that of the administrative state. It is also a struggle between right and left, as the right keeps winning elections while the left keeps amassing institutional power beyond the reach of voters. It is therefore also a competition between two visions of the Jewish state: The right holds a national view of liberal democracy, and cherishes the Jewish religion and tradition, while the left is increasingly progressive, globalist, and suspicious of religion and nationalism alike. Finally, it is also a class struggle between the country’s diverse, less affluent majority and the old-guard, established Ashkenazi elite. And when you have an event so cataclysmic as to simultaneously bring all three aspects—the institutional, the ideological and the sociological—to a showdown, you have a political supernova.
That this struggle is playing out over trivial issues makes one thing clear: The trial is not about what the establishment and the media tell us it’s about.
Two documentary films The Trial (2022) and its newly premiered sequel, The Trial II (2025), expose the political story behind the Netanyahu investigations and the trial that followed, up to the present. They thus fill a gap left by a partisan press which failed to inform the public of how the cases began and where they now stand. The Trial aired on YouTube just before the fifth of five election rounds, and may have contributed to the victory of the coalition Netanyahu still heads to this day. The timing was opportune: For four inconclusive rounds of elections, the investigations then the indictment and the start of the trial had hurt Netanyahu at the polling stations. But as the trial dragged on, a growing number of voters came to believe that Netanyahu was being framed by the establishment, and returned to supporting him.
The Trial was produced by Avi Gross and Ophir Falk (who is an adviser to the prime minister), based on a script by Yoad Ben-Yosef, and directed by Gilad Goldschmidt. It was assembled mostly from interviews with journalists, lawyers, former state prosecutors, law professors and a former politician from the Labor Party. What was striking was the fact that the majority of the talking heads in the film are not Netanyahu supporters. Some are even staunch adversaries. All of which made the film highly effective, as it showed that even adversaries, if they were fair-minded, saw foul play.
Much water has flowed under the bridge since: The Netanyahu government attempted to pass a reform to check the excessive power of the judiciary. A year of chaos ensued, taking Israel to the brink of what seemed like civil war, which ended with the collapse of the reform legislation and an increase in the judiciary’s power. Then there was the war that began with the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and led to the destruction of the Shiite axis and Israel’s geopolitical supremacy over its most dangerous foe, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Throughout this turmoil, Netanyahu’s trial continued apace. And so a sequel was in order.
The new film—just under 20 minutes long—concentrates on four main points that emerged in the interim: 1) The judges have advised the prosecution to drop the bribery charge, which is the only weighty charge in the whole indictment. 2) The growing sense that the indictment as a whole was never intended to be put to the test in court. 3) Lawsuits against the state by state witnesses claiming they were illegally subjected to pressure to force them to cooperate. And finally, the absurdity of forcing Netanyahu to spend all that time in court while Israel is fighting for its life.
The drama now reaching its climax in court actually began in 1977, when Labor first lost power to Likud. Soon after their defeat, the left-leaning elites began to mobilize in order to secure their power outside the purview of electoral politics. Most importantly, politicians from the left side of the aisle appealed to the Supreme Court to adjudicate in matters that were heretofore considered political. Their ambitions eventually intersected with those of the most activist judge in Israel’s history, Aharon Barak, of whom Judge Robert H. Bork has said that he established “a world record for judicial hubris.”
Barak started his public career as an aggressive attorney general. Then as Supreme Court judge, he began diligently to lay the groundwork for an overhaul of Israel’s system of government that would establish judicial supremacy over the elected branches to a degree that exists in no other Western democratic nation. The alliance with Labor was not based on principle. Barak was primarily concerned with increasing his court’s power. He cared little which party controlled the elected branches. And so when the left retook power in 1992, friction within this alliance of convenience began to show. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin resented the expansion of the court’s power, and especially Barak’s growing influence.
As attorney general in the 1970s, Barak had forced then-Prime Minister Rabin to resign over a relatively minor infraction regarding a foreign bank account that was formally under his wife’s name, back when he was ambassador to Washington. Moreover, it was during Labor’s tenure that Barak, as Supreme Court judge, made the most crucial moves to solidify the power of jurists over elected politicians: He augmented the power of the attorney general—who also serves as the legal counsel to the executive—and ruled that the government must defer to the AG’s counsel. Thanks to Barak, Israel now had an appointed official with power to veto cabinet decisions.
Barak also ruled that ministers must resign if they are indicted, thus giving the state attorney the power to remove elected politicians from office. Barak then took advantage of the nation’s distraction during the mourning period for the slain Rabin, to announce the court’s new power of judicial review over legislation. He proved adept at such Marbury v. Madison moves, gradually amassing power in the long run by making concessions to the other branches of government in the short run.
The rise of the attorney general’s power laid the groundwork for the ensuing drama of the Netanyahu trial, because the court now had a praetorian guard which began to find grounds for criminal investigations whenever ministers got it in their minds to limit the power of the court or the AG. So long as those investigated and indicted were on the right, the left was happy to rally “against corruption,” real or imagined, or at least against “the corruption of our democratic institutions,” and in support of the court and the AG.
With Netanyahu’s fourth electoral victory in 2015, the country’s left-leaning elite had come to despair of winning at the ballot box. That was the point when the machinery that Barak had assembled over the preceding decades kicked into high gear. The issue was no longer about removing unfriendly justice ministers or curbing the governing coalition’s power, or even facilitating the implementation of the Gaza disengagement plan. It was now about taking back control of the ship of state, the direction of which was still, formally at least, the purview of Israel’s electorate.
The hunt for Netanyahu, which had largely been background noise confined to dead-end minor investigations, went into overdrive. Much like Russiagate in the U.S., “never Bibi” journalists churned out “investigative” pieces, which created the need to “look into” their claims, and in some cases eventually led to criminal investigations and indictments. So began the so-called “Thousands Cases”—four serial corruption cases against the prime minister, numbered 1000, 2000, 3000, and 4000.
The investigations, indictments and the start of the trial that followed damaged Netanyahu but not enough to take him down. By the fifth round of elections, when the boomerang effect kicked in, the cases were falling apart in court: When cross examined, every single prosecution witness turned out to be a boon for the defense. Not that it means Netanyahu will be acquitted. As the dirty cop in one of Israel’s most popular TV series says: “the system will always protect itself.”
Before her passing in 2020, the late professor Ruth Gavison, one of Israel’s most revered scholars of jurisprudence, had remarked that she did not believe Netanyahu will get a fair trial in Israel’s courts. She did not elaborate, but it’s not hard to guess why she said that. Israel’s elites form a more or less coherent ruling class. They mostly share a common ethnic identity, social outlook, and ideology. Within that class, the legal profession constitutes a distinct caste, with the progressive Supreme Court serving as a kind of uber-government. And since judges and prosecutors all belong to the same small social circle at the heart of this elite, the judges presiding over the Netanyahu trial are not likely to humiliate the state prosecution and the powerful attorney general’s office by acquitting defendant No. 1 in the prosecution’s flagship case. To do so would be an unthinkable slap in the face.
It’s possible that Gavison may have also recognized that the court would never allow the rule by Platonic philosopher-judges to bend to what it sees as the low politics of the deplorable mob. It was Aharon Barak, after all, who developed a theory of democracy whose true “essence” was human rights, defended by the courts, while elections were relegated to mere “procedure.” The temptation then is to construe the function of the entire system as defending this supposed “essence” against the noisy irrelevancies of democratic procedure, by granting the courts as much power as possible.
If you get your Israel news from the legacy media, and haven’t seen The Trial, you may not know how weak the cases against Netanyahu really are. You are also unlikely to be aware of the main story in Part II of the documentary: After all the witnesses of the prosecution were heard, the judges called the prosecutors to tell them there are “difficulties” with the bribery charge and suggest that it should be withdrawn. In fact, as several commentators in The Trial II observe, without the bribery charge there may not have been reason enough to bring charges against a sitting prime minister at all. But the prosecution refused to heed the judges’ advice, suggesting, oddly, that they believe they could still prove the case based on the testimonies of defense witnesses.
The bribery charge against Netanyahu started with a theory put forward in an “investigative” piece by Gidi Weitz in Haaretz that was published shortly after Netanyahu’s 2015 electoral victory. The piece argued that the Walla! news website had become “the advertising site for the Netanyahu family.” According to Weitz’s theory, Walla!’s former owner, the tycoon Shaul Elovitch, was friendly with Netanyahu, who supposedly rewarded him for Walla!’s PR services. Since Elovitch also was then the controlling shareholder in the Bezeq telecommunications company, Netanyahu, in Weitz’s telling, returned the favor with regulatory concessions to Bezeq, since he also held the communications portfolio in the cabinet at the time.
While the investigation was ongoing, and before Netanyahu’s team had access to the evidence, the Israeli public was treated to almost daily “bombshell” leaks about the case. “I know Case 4000 inside and out,” wrote Maariv senior political columnist Ben Caspit. “It’s an exceptionally serious bribery case—airtight and sealed.” Raviv Drucker, anchorman for Channel 13 News, and one of Israel’s highest paid journalists, who also writes for Haaretz, conducted a “public trial of Case 4000” on television—a transparent and legally suspect attempt to prejudice everyone involved in the case, and possibly to intimidate witnesses.
But Case 4000 was a dubious construction in more ways than one, and it soon began to fray. It turned out that the supposedly shady Bezeq deal was actually approved by the entire regulatory bureaucracy before it was presented to the minister of communications—Netanyahu—for signing. Moreover, the meeting in which Netanyahu allegedly instructed the director general of the Ministry of Communications to cut Elovitch some slack could not have taken place at the dates suggested by the indictment. The prosecution had built its theory without conducting cellphone-tower triangulation, which ended up showing that the director was nowhere near the prime minister’s office within the relevant time frame. Lastly, it turned out that coverage on the Walla! site was actually hostile to Netanyahu, destroying the idea of a quid pro quo.
The original theory of “positive [media] coverage” as a form of bribery itself was dubious enough. As Alan Dershowitz observed, it would enable the criminalization of normal relations between politicians and journalists. But since the coverage was not even positive, how could the charge be sustained?
The prosecution proved to be exceptionally creative in its effort to impose the serious charge of bribery on the uncooperative facts. It amended the definition of the bribe from “positive coverage” to “unusual responsiveness” to requests by Netanyahu or his close associates to alter coverage. Oddly, this new theory did not come with any indication of what constitutes normal responsiveness. Moreover, the defense was able to show that the site showed more eager responsiveness to requests from Netanyahu’s adversary, then-Labor candidate for prime minister and now President Isaac Herzog, to amend its coverage.
Unsurprisingly, by this point (end of 2020), judges were beginning to fidget uncomfortably on the bench. They were especially concerned that the prosecution brought no examples of alleged “unusual responsiveness.” As one of them put it, “We are not sure that it is enough to say that there is a forest, without telling us about the trees that comprise the forest in this case.”
In response, the prosecution, using the full resources of the powerful legal establishment, hastily compiled a list of 315 alleged cases of “unusual responsiveness.” This in turn gave rise to “Project 315.” The project was initiated by a group of four volunteers who set out to recruit and manage a larger group of part-time volunteers to check each of the 315 items on the “unusual responsiveness” list. One of the four, Guy Levy, had worked previously as a spokesperson for then MK Amir Ohana, currently speaker of the Knesset. Levy was then out of political life. The other three were ordinary citizens with no apparent connections to politics: a successful businessman named Moshik Kovarsky, a psychology Ph.D. named Adi Szabo, and Moshe Mallal, a high-tech professional.
Their fact-checking came back with devastating results. According to Project 315 almost half of the listed items did not include any intervention by Netanyahu, and are therefore irrelevant. In much of the rest, there was no responsiveness at all, let alone evidence of unusual responsiveness—that is, requests from the PM’s office were simply ignored. Other cases turned out to be press releases, which were sent out simultaneously to all other major news outlets. Only a handful of about 15,000 items mentioning Netanyahu in the relevant time frame could be framed as ex gratia deference to the wishes of the prime minister. One such case had to do with Kaya, the Netanyahu family dog. So much for Walla! being “the advertising site for the Netanyahu family.”
All this evidence-mangling constitutes, at best, criminal negligence by the prosecution. At worst, it was a deliberate attempt to mislead the court. No wonder that the chief prosecutor in charge of the cases, Liat Ben-Ari, has decided midtrial to retire from her job.
The other cases, it seems, are not faring any better. Case 3000 did not lead to an indictment. Case 2000 involves a conversation that never bore fruit between Netanyahu and a top newspaper publisher over favorable coverage (again, recast as an alleged bribe). And Case 1000, featuring the now-famous Bugs Bunny doll, which is currently falling apart in court. While the case rests on proving that the quantities of Champagne and cigars gifted to members of the Netanyahu family went well beyond the ordinary exchange of gifts between friends, it has now turned out that the police had no material proof of what these amounts actually were—no receipt, no household records, or even text messages concerning delivery—which makes the numbers cited in the indictment look like an amateurish con. One of the chief police investigators stunned the court when he said his estimate relied on looking into billionaire Arnon Milchan’s eyes.
Last but not least, there is the plethora of thuggish crimes committed against the main state witnesses in an attempt to force them to say what the prosecution demanded. Investigators directly threatened to destroy witnesses’ families, insinuated that personal secrets would be exposed, recorded them illegally in consultation rooms, housed them in flea-infested cells, deprived them of medicine, food and sleep, and digitally penetrated one of them. Again, they came up empty-handed. Two witnesses are now suing the state for millions, and are poised to win.
We tend to think of the behavior of the press in these cases as a betrayal of their role as watchdog, by serving as the PR arms of the institutions they are supposed to scrutinize. But if you consider that the cases were never intended to reach court, then an even more disturbing picture emerges: law enforcement agencies acting as the investigative arm of the press, on behalf of the elites that control them both. Using their special legal standing to employ state-sanctioned invasive tools and target citizens with cyberweapons, these agencies were in fact producing political dirt to be leaked to the press, not criminal evidence to be used in court, in order to hurt a politician in the court of public opinion.
That the whole charade was politically motivated is underscored by the fact that leading journalists and jurists have long insinuated that Netanyahu could always cut a deal. Professor Menny Mautner, former dean of the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University, recently addressed Netanyahu directly in a piece in Haaretz proposing such a deal. If the prime minister were to choose the path of peace with the Palestinians, Mautner wrote, then “I am convinced” that “it would be possible to conclude your trial quickly and to your satisfaction.” Mautner submitted all this, he said, “as a jurist.”
Meanwhile, Aharon Barak, the architect of the Supreme Court’s power grab, weighed in from the sanctuary of retirement. Also writing in Haaretz, the oracle whose words are still authoritative for the juristocratic order that guards the administrative state, proposed that since a pardon in Israel can only be handed after a conviction, Netanyahu should opt for a plea deal, in return for which the prime minister would retire from public life. Barak’s offer is as close as anything to an admission that the whole trial was never more than a political hit job.
It is not difficult to guess why Barak seems to have decided to cut his losses. The trial has jeopardized the entire structure that he built. The move to take down the country’s longest-serving prime minister by openly weaponizing the law may prove to have been a bridge too far. Judicial supremacy requires the semblance of “the rule of law” in a nominally democratic system. But the trial has lifted the veil on that artifice. When the defense calls the former AG who filed the indictments, the police investigators, and the state attorneys to the stand, the administrative state itself will be on trial.
The truth is that the coalition of Israel’s old elites and their citadels of power are actually on the wane. For one, they are old. Any cursory look at the photographs from the “never Bibi” demonstrations will show a great many gray heads. Their demographic decline is inevitable. Second, their ideological drive is spent, having pinned their hopes on peace with the Palestinians and a two-state solution, neither of which seems relevant to Israel’s right-wing majority, which has only grown since Oct. 7. Electoral fraud of the kind practiced by Naftali Bennett—where parties who ran on a right-wing platform then give their parliamentary seats to a left-dominated governing coalition—are the left’s only remaining shot at a Knesset majority. Third, a state cannot be ruled indefinitely from the bench. Fourth, the left’s media propaganda arm has spent its credit on wild lies about the judicial reform, Netanyahu’s trial, and the war in Gaza.
Finally, in their desperation to rescue the two-state solution, left elites have committed a gross political miscalculation by focusing their energies on taking down a government during wartime. Fighting Netanyahu while Netanyahu is fighting Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran looks too much like siding with our enemies. Above all, the generation that has demonstrated astonishing bravery on the battlefield is not likely to tolerate a pro-Palestinian progressive agenda, or the nullification of their democratic rights and personal liberties.
Netanyahu’s voters expect him to fight this legal battle to the end—ironically for the same reason that Aharon Barak would like to see it terminated: The deep state is on trial, too, and it must lose, in order for Israeli democracy to triumph.
This story originally appeared in Tablet magazine, at tabletmag.com, and is reprinted with permission.
Wow! I don’t know if the Left is worse in the USA or In Israel. I think they put Begin on house arrest too.
The root of this problem is indeed the judiciary. The left has managed to acquire a lot of power in that region beyond the reach of the elections. This has to be defeated in order to restore the democracy that Israel is proud of.
It seems that the justice reform is dead for now and cannot proceed. This hampers the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip and all of Netanyahu’s flailing and frothing at the mouth will not help until the Israeli deep state is removed. This is the only reason that the war is continuing. Sure, there are other reasons in play but this is the most important one. It opens a door to international interference in Israel’s internal politics and the simple command by a lawyer NOT to do something in the war against the terrorists must be stopped. Like Netanyahu himself apparently said, don’t tell anybody what we are about to do because they will find some way, probably a lawyer, to stop it. The IDF command structure badly needs a reform too, not just the political structure.