Grilled Netanyahu, medium-rare, and hold the details

The scene of police officers arriving to interrogate the prime minister of Israel was enough to make headlines in Israel and abroad on Tuesday, as Benjamin Netanyahu was questioned under caution in the preliminary stages of a corruption probe. The event was the subject of live TV broadcasts from outside the Prime Minister’s Residence in central Jerusalem on Monday evening when the police arrived, followed by hour-by-hour updates from reporters standing in the rain as detectives quizzed Netanyahu for about three hours. In the aftermath, the Hebrew newspapers all led with the story, albeit with scant details concerning the particulars of the investigation itself.

After the grilling by high profile crimes investigators, the attorney general came out with a statement confirming that preliminary investigations into allegations against Netanyahu were now a full-blown criminal investigation. The turning point in the preliminary investigation, which has been carried out since June, came three months ago, Yedioth Ahronoth reports. The Justice Ministry confirmed that “in the past month testimony was gathered that changed the status of the evidence in this regard.”

Aside from the fact that the police are looking into allegations that Netanyahu committed “apparent crimes breaching ethical norms,” as Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit said in his statement, the papers have little else to say concerning the specifics of the investigation. As Netanyahu’s grilling goes on, hard reporting is rare. Papers rely almost entirely on the statements issued by the police and attorney general’s office for their reportage.

Only Haaretz provides the limited details it previously reported; to wit, Netanyahu accepted hundreds of thousands of shekels worth of gifts from wealthy persons. The paper is sure to inform its readers early on that Netanyahu and members of his family are expected to be questioned again by police in the coming days.

“The elephant in the room,” as Yedioth Ahronoth’s Nahum Barnea calls it, is the absence of information about the suspicions against Netanyahu. The term Mandelblit used — “breaching ethical norms” — “is a type of suspicion that you can’t pass over on the agenda.” The fact that the attorney general announced that the previous cases against the prime minister were closed, he says, “are testament to the size of the cases still open.”

He says Mandelblit’s announcement was an attempt to assuage Netanyahu’s supporters and political defenders (such as the lawmaker who proposed a bill to prevent investigation of a prime minister in office), and convince them he’s not an enemy, so that they won’t obstruct the current investigation.

Barnea’s bottom line about the new investigation is clear. “This confidentiality by the attorney general can’t continue much longer. The public deserves to know what its prime minister is being investigated for in a criminal probe.”

It should come as a surprise to virtually nobody who’s familiar with the Hebrew papers that Israel Hayom‘s front page broadcasts Netanyahu’s determined dismissal of suspicions against him. “Hold off on the celebrations,” he told a Likud party meeting on Monday, which is what appears across the front of the pro-Netanyahu paper.

Haim Shine, ever vigilant against the vile treachery of the “left-wing Israeli media,” writes a venomous op-ed against the “coordinated and organized campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family.”

This witch hunt, he says, stems from “A Bibiphobic [sic] psychosis born of deep frustration, dejection and desperation of the left to effect regime change at the ballot box.” (This diagnosis comes from Rabbi Dr. Haim Shine, PhD, who holds a doctorate in jurisprudence, not psychiatry.) “Desperation that strengthened after the last elections, in which they invested millions, especially from foreign sources, who cooperated with familiar persons in the Israeli media to depose the right,” he says. If it sounds familiar, it’s because he’s reiterating the same tropes he uses in every op-ed he writes defending Netanyahu (see here, here and here, all from this year alone, for example).

Shine’s hackneyed expression of deep-seated paranoid schizophrenia (See? I can throw around psychiatric terms, too) is just a means to convey his ultimate point, already stated by Netanyahu himself. “Perhaps it will turn out that concerning these suspicions there is nothing because there wasn’t anything,” Shine writes, parroting the prime minister. “Time will tell.”

Although Haaretz’s analysts, prognosticators and pundits would ordinarily be all over an investigation of Netanyahu like flies on a carcass, there’s nary an opinion piece about the police investigation to be seen. The paper does run an op-ed by Tal Niv, however, in which he exhorts former prime minister Ehud Barak to be a modern day Israeli Cincinnatus. “Rise Ehud Barak, roll up your sleeves, put down Twitter for a moment,” he writes (is Twitter the modern equivalent of the plow?). “The hour has come. The Israeli opposition needs a leader.”

“Someone needs to operate the mechanism to rescue Democracy,” he writes in exuberant and florid terms. “Now is the time for action” against Netanyahu, whom Niv calls “a despot.”

“Commence the second revolution. Demonstrate your skills to the public in a practical way, and not just with tweets. Defend the work of the police and prosecutors. The day in which Netanyahu is forced to get off his throne and vacate it is close. The time has come.”