Netanyahu, j’accuse…!

The scandal involving an accused French fraudster businessman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu grows ever louder, with both parties engaging in a battle of recriminations that may only end with a criminal investigation. The episode has all the makings of a Hebrew media feeding frenzy: foreign money, allegations of corruption, a shady Frenchman and the prime minister himself. Needless to say, it’s the top story of the day in all three major dailies.

After the prime minister copped to receiving $40,000 from Arnaud Mimran in 2001 as a private citizen on Monday, Mimran went on air later that night and told the Israeli press that he gave Netanyahu €170,000, five times the sum Netanyahu admitted to. Netanyahu’s office fired back saying Mimran was lying and trying to harm the prime minister with his allegation.

As one might expect, Israel Hayom dutifully reports the prime minister’s attorney on its front page vehemently denying any wrongdoing by Netanyahu in the affair. “Mimran’s claims will be disproved; the air is out of the balloon,” reads the paper’s headline, quoting Netanyahu’s lawyer.

Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth, however, lead with Mimran’s charge that he put €170,000 in Netanyahu’s private account, not the trust for public affairs that the lawyers admitted to. Yedioth Ahronoth calls the whole episode “Netanyahu’s French zigzag,” describing how the prime minister initially denied receiving any money, but after Mimran said in court that he gave Netanyahu a million, Netanyahu admitted to a small sum, which Mimran then said was quite a bit larger. The paper runs a profile of Mimran (whom it calls “A playboy, a gambler, a billionaire”) and also reports that various investigative agencies in Israel are checking whether Netanyahu reported the donation to Israeli tax authorities. In all, the paper devotes its first five pages to Netanyahu and his French connection.

Netanyahu’s denial doesn’t even make it on the front page of Haaretz, but everything above the fold in Tuesday’s paper is about the prime minister: the Mimran episode, Netanyahu’s arrival in Moscow for a meeting with Putin accompanied by a photo of him walking past a Red Army color guard, and the appointment of his associate as head of the Channel 10 TV directorate.

Israel Hayom’s Haim Shine denounces “the Israeli left and the old elites” and the “national media sport” of hunting Netanyahu.

“For many years already, from morning till night, they attempt to create delegitimization of Netanyahu,” he says, employing that hot button word so popular in the discourse about the BDS movement so as to draw a moral equivalence between delegitimizing Netanyahu and Israel.

Attempts to generate scandal about Netanyahu “weren’t enough to change the regime in Israel,” he says, gearing up for another tacit equation of Netanyahu and the people of Israel itself. “Unfortunately, you can’t change the nation, which knows and understands the motives of the media and isn’t stirred by witch hunts.”

While Shine concedes at the end of his rant that there could be meat to this latest scandal, he calls on the press to cool its heels and wait for investigators to run their course.

While Yedioth Ahronoth jumps on Mimran’s bandwagon in shouting “J’Accuse!”, its op-ed by Nahum Barnea is more moderate. Every man is innocent until proven guilty, he says, and “I advise not to rush to jump to conclusions.”

Nonetheless, such an incident does deserve intensive investigation, and “the prime minister cannot serve when a cloud of this type hovers over his head. That was correct concerning Netanyahu’s predecessor as prime minister [Ehud Olmert], and applies to him as well,” Barnea says.

He says that even if this episode doesn’t lead to legal proceedings, it’s hard to believe that the Zionist Union would join Netanyahu’s government. “Politicians, like sharks, can smell blood. And it smells like blood,” he concludes.

The spat between newly minted coalition partners Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and Education Minister Naftali Bennett barely gets notice amid the brouhaha surrounding the prime minister. Israel Hayom reports that Liberman told Bennett to cool his jets and stop butting heads with the boss over talk of peace talks with the Palestinians. “I recommend to Minister Bennett to undergo the operation of lengthening his fuse that I underwent,” Liberman said.

Haaretz, shockingly, sides with Jewish Home party leader Bennett for once. Bennett accused Netanyahu of speaking out of both sides of his mouth, saying he’s in “favor of the Land of Israel in Hebrew, and setting up the state of Palestine in English.” The paper’s editorial calls on the prime minister to say it in Hebrew if he’s serious about peace with the Palestinians.

“It could be that Netanyahu is just trying to ease the pressure on him from within and without, and believes that spouting out meaningless comments about peace while decorating his coalition with MKs from Zionist Union will satisfy his rivals enough to leave him alone,” Haaretz says. “But if he’s serious, and really does see an opportunity to advance the two-state solution and plans to take advantage of it, he cannot make do with general statements and the launching of media trial balloons. He must present a diplomatic plan to the Israeli public that will clarify the extent of his willingness to realize the vision he described in his Bar-Ilan speech seven years ago. And he must do it in Hebrew, as his rival Bennett challenged him to do.”