THE ACCUSATIONS THAT COULD BRING BIBI DOWN

It’s a story out of the tabloids of the 1920s

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu points at a screen during a press conference at the Government Press Office in Jerusalem on September 4. / Photo by Abir Sultan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images.

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.