It’s a story out of the tabloids of the 1920s
Menachem Mizrahi is a highly respected judge in Israel, a conservative jurist whose magistrate court is the most basic in the country’s court hierarchy, with jurisdiction over criminal matters and family disputes. He has now jailed five senior military and government officials in a rapidly expanding criminal investigation that could lead to the end of Benjamin Netanyahu’s third term as prime minister. And he has ordered the case sealed.
Few outside the media are questioning Mizrahi’s caution, given the issues surrounding the case. They essentially involve actions taken by Netanyahu who is desperate to stay in office. He was allegedly the catalyst of blackmail, theft of highly secret documents, and falsification of transcripts of secret cabinet meetings, all of stemming from his casual public release of one of the Israeli military’s most sensitive documents on Hamas’s operational control of the October 7 hostages, who, if still alive, have been captive for thirteen months.
The issues have energized and enraged the sometimes—but not always—accommodating Israeli press, who realize that underneath the media hoopla is the fact that the cases, once unraveled, could tell the distraught and embittered families of the hostages that they were right all along:
Netanyahu did not make a hostage release deal with Hamas when one was possible because to do so would have jeopardized his standing with Israel’s religious far right. Their openly stated goal is to gain control of Gaza and the West Bank, as mandated by a fanatical reading of the Bible. And to hell with the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank continuously under murderous Israeli military attack.
The judge’s actions have made headlines around the world. The emphasis was initially on a Netanyahu aide who leaked a distorted version—friendly to the prime minister—of what the Israeli intelligence community had learned about the plight of remaining hostages to the Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper in the UK. An even more distorted version was provided to the Bild, a right-wing tabloid in Germany known for its support of Netanyahu’s government. The British article’s thrust was to support Netanyahu’s contention that the off-and-on talks with Hamas would never result in a ceasefire because Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who was killed last month, was prepared to flee Gaza for Iran, via Egypt, and would take the hostages with him.
I was cautioned by a well-informed American who told me that the Biden administration, although continuing to supply intelligence and weapons to Israel, “cannot provide political guidance to the Israeli leadership without gaining access to all of the records in the case.” He acknowledged that the implications of Biden’s past and present support for Netanyahu’s wars “are indeed serious. So serious that we must have all the facts” before accusing an allied leader with not making a hostage deal when one was on the table.
The families of the remaining hostages have gone much further in their constant marches and protests against Netanyahu, whom they claim is guilty of what they repeatedly call “the murder” of the remaining hostages for his reluctance to agree to a ceasefire, which Hamas has demanded in exchange for any further hostage release.
A revelatory moment came on September 4, when Netanyahu convened a televised press conference for foreign reporters to explain why a pending hostage deal and ceasefire with Hamas would not take place. The prime minister explained that there were dangers posed to the IDF if Hamas were to get access to a narrow strip of land in bordering Egypt known as the known as the Philadelphi Corridor. A decade ago Egyptcontrolled a series of tunnels bordering Gaza for nearly nine miles that was named after the Philadelphi Accord of 2005. “Once we got out [of Gaza], once we left the Philadelphi Corridor,” Netanyahu told the foreign press, “Iran could carry out a plan to turn Gaza into a base, a terrorist enclave that would endanger Tel Aviv, Jerusalem . . . the entire country of Israel.”
The tunnels had been a source of widespread smuggling after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. They were sealed a decade ago, and Egypt has remained responsible for controlling its side of the border. But Netanyahu was not done with his fantasy talk. A moment later, he walked over to an easel that contained an enlarged photograph of a page in Arabic. He did not say that the page came from one of the most highly secret documents in the Israeli intelligence archive.
“You should see this,” he said, pointing to the page. “This is their tactic. This is Hamas orders for psychological warfare, found in [a] Hamas underground command on January 29. . . . And this is the original document in Arabic.” Repeating the claim from the Jewish Chronicle, Netanyahu said that the document showed that Sinwar planned to move some or all of the remaining hostages to Egypt for relay to Iran via the Philadelphi Corridor if the IDF was close to capturing him.
It was the prime minister’s display of one of Israeli intelligence’s most highly classified documents that triggered the judiciary inquiry. At the time, the document was among the most closely held secrets in Israel and could only be read in a designated secure location under close monitoring in the archives of the Israeli military intelligence headquarters—known in Israel by its Hebrew initials as Aman. I have been told by a well-informed Israeli that the actual pages in the document flatly contradict what Netanyahu claimed to be Sinwar’s last-minute gambit to keep the hostages out of hands of the IDF by fleeing with them to Egypt. The next two pages of the twelve-page document made clear that Sinwar had categorically rejected that idea.
Subsequent analysis of the document by experts at the intelligence headquarters determined that the document may not have been written by Sinwar, but by a top Hamas commander.
Netanyahu’s casual public disclosure and display of the secret papers from the military’s intelligence archives triggered the inevitable investigation. One obvious question was that if Netanyahu was able to get access to the Sinwar papers, what else had been removed, or shared, without any official record? The penalty for gaining access to such material without formal approval for doing so is no less than fifteen years in prison.
The prime minister’s office was ordered by the court to return all of its top secret documents and was reminded that any attempt to alter or change the wording of such documents is also punishable. It was apparently the display of the classified materials in the Jewish Chronicle in the UK that led to Judge Mizrahi’s decision initially to order the case sealed.
At this point, I was told by an informed Israeli, things began to get recklessly out of control and much more sordid. Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, wanted to have other highly classified documents in his office, presumably dealing in some cases with Netanyahu’s ties to the far right, altered to insulate Netanyahu from potential accusations. Braverman learned that one of the senior male officers on duty at Aman was having an affair with a 21-year-old female subordinate.
The officer later told investigators that he was approached by someone from the prime minister’s office who warned him that the office had compromising material on him, and in order to prevent the information from leaking, he would have to turn various secret documents and transcripts to Netanyahu’s office—obviously for possible tampering or deletion. The officer did not take the bait and set up a meeting with General Herzi Halevi, the army’s chief of staff, and told him of the blackmail attempt. The senior officer did not turn over any documents to the prime minister’s office.
A lingering question is: how did Netanyahu get access to the closely held Sinwar hostage document he made public at his press conference on September 4? The Israeli media had reported before its suppression by court order that it was obtained by a Netanyahu press aide, Eli Feldstein, whose name has been made public by the media. He is a follower of the religious right in Israel and was formerly a press aide to the extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, now minister of national security. It was Feldstein who allegedly provided the misleading highly classified information about the Hamas hostage document trove to the Jewish Chronicle in the UK two days before Bibi’s press conference for foreign journalists. It is believed by many in the Israeli media that Feldstein was in contact with fellow religious extremists inside the Aman top secret archives—some 40 percent of the IDF identify with the religious right—and enlisted them in an effort to ensure that the most sensitive documents on file in Aman presented Netanyahu in the best possible light. The recklessness and illegality of the religious-driven chain of document corruption is now under study by the court.
With his assassination of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and his destruction of Iran’s advanced anti-missile system in Isfahan, Netanyahu is once again riding high in the polls in deeply traumatized Israel.
There is little reason, however, to believe that the Israeli prime minister and the chain of religious fanatics who support him will be able to influence the judgments of Judge Mizrahi, who is said to be ready to release more information, possibly later this week, to the public.
It must be noted here that some members of the Israeli press corps, operating in wartime, have been in the forefront in reporting on ethical issues inside the prime minister’s office. The daily media, led by the Yedioth Ahronot, revealed months before the current scandal that officials in Netanyahu’s office had been altering official documents dealing in part with the pre-Gaza war days to put Netanyahu in a better light. One goal of the falsifications was to minimize the prime minister’s responsibility for the military’s lack of intelligence and preparation on October 7.
What is already known makes it clear that Netanyahu has turned his office, as an Israeli friend said to me, “into an office of organized crime. He has taken the country hostage and is willing to sacrifice his people to keep out of jail.”
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