Netanyahu’s aides fronting for Qatar? Sadly, more plausible than the PM’s ‘deep state’ defense
The allegation that the PM’s aides have been working for a country that would not be unhappy to see Israel destroyed is almost too horrendous to contemplate. Except that the PM, rather than urging an expedited probe, is doing his utmost to discredit the investigators
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
Here’s Yair Cherki, one of Israel’s smartest and most well-liked reporters and commentators, speaking in Hebrew on Channel 12 on Monday night:
“Think of a foreign ambassador who is reporting back to his country on what’s happening in Israel. The ruling party has put out an announcement that the secret service is carrying out a coup by means of issuing arrest warrants. The prime minister in the morning announces the appointment of a new head of the secret service, but abandons the appointment at noon because his political base said no. This whole saga here — the suspicions against people in the prime minister’s circle, the suspicions that, at a time of war between Israel and Hamas, they worked in the service of a state that funded Hamas?!? You have to translate that into English in order to take a step back for a second and understand how insane this all is.”
Indeed, this week’s legal, political and security developments are proving dizzying, beyond even Israel’s recently elevated mind-blowing norms. They’d be deeply worrying for those who care about Israel at any time, but are still more so in the midst of war.
Let’s try to make sense of them.
Monday morning finds Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving evidence, in his own defense, in his never-ending criminal trial, in a courtroom in Tel Aviv.
Out of the blue, his lawyer, Amit Hadad, has to abandon his most important client because another man he represents, longtime senior prime ministerial adviser Jonatan Urich, has been arrested. Urich, it turns out, is about to be questioned under caution for his alleged central role in the so-called Qatargate affair, in which Urich and one or more other aides who work for Netanyahu are suspected of taking money from Qatar and representatives of Qatar in order to promote Qatar’s interests, including as regards 17 months of hostage-ceasefire negotiations, at the expense of the other key regional mediator, Egypt.
At about the same time, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara approves police questioning of Netanyahu himself — not as a suspect in the case, but as a central potential witness whose testimony is important. And so the Netanyahu convoy speeds back from Tel Aviv to the Prime Minister’s Office, where he can prepare to host the police investigators.
Fresh from representing Urich — who is remanded into custody on suspicion of having contact with a foreign agent, money laundering, bribery, fraud and breach of trust — lawyer Hadad heads to the Prime Minister’s Office to represent Netanyahu again. Corruption trial in the morning; Qatargate in the afternoon.
Also questioned and remanded over Qatargate is Eli Feldstein, a former aide to Netanyahu, who has already been charged in a third ongoing legal matter — the alleged theft and leaking of classified IDF intelligence materials relating to the war in Gaza. He allegedly leaked material from one such document to the German daily Bild, in a move allegedly timed and calculated to reduce criticism of Netanyahu’s handling of the hostage-ceasefire talks, after six hostages were murdered by their Hamas captors in Gaza last August.
Feldstein is not represented by Hadad, but rather by Oded Savoray, who has indicated that his client’s family is worried that Feldstein is being set up as a fall guy for the Prime Minister’s Office in the leaked documents case. It was reported in December that unnamed political operatives were pressing the family to replace Savoray, and even offering to pay Feldstein’s legal fees, with Hadad’s name mentioned as a potential replacement, but Savoray remains in situ.
Ultra-ubiquitous lawyer Hadad is, however, representing yet another Netanyahu aide, Yisrael (Srulik) Einhorn, who the police are seeking to question in the stolen and leaked documents case, but who is living in Serbia and has to date chosen not to return to Israel. Einhorn would appear to be connected to the Qatargate probe as well, since it was reported last year that he and Urich worked together on a public relations campaign for Qatar to improve its image surrounding its hosting of the 2022 soccer World Cup.
At a Qatargate court hearing on Tuesday, a police representative noted that his representation of Netanyahu and Urich might be somewhat problematic.
“There is a problem here in that attorney Amit Hadad represents the prime minister, and is also the attorney of one of the suspects here,” Superintendent Gili Rachlin told the court. “Attorney Hadad was with the prime minister yesterday after we finished the questioning. He knows what he [Netanyahu] said in his testimony. What he was asked. There is, therefore, a significant concern for obstruction of justice.”
Hadad took offense at the notion, insisting any such concerns were unfounded.
By the way, Hadad is also representing Urich, Einhorn and a third Netanyahu aide, Ofer Golan, in a case involving the alleged harassment of a state’s witness in Netanyahu’s criminal trial.
Confused? It gets worse.
The wider context
This entire spectacularly intricate and complicated legal saga is unfolding not only in courtrooms, police investigation rooms and in meetings with suspects, witnesses, investigators and lawyers. It is also deeply connected both to national law enforcement hierarchies and appointments, and to the ongoing war and the fate of the 59 hostages, 24 of them believed to be alive, still held in Gaza.
Political opponents of Netanyahu have cited the Qatargate probe, and its potential to entangle the prime minister as a key motivation in Netanyahu’s decision last month to seek the ouster of Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar — a proposal unanimously approved by the Israeli cabinet in the early hours of March 21. The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, has been involved in probing Qatargate from the start, and also in probing the alleged theft and leak of classified IDF documents for which Feldstein has been indicted.
In a letter he sent to cabinet ministers ahead of their vote on Netanyahu’s proposal to fire him, Bar asserted that the move was “entirely tainted by improper considerations and personal and institutional conflicts of interest of the highest order.” He specifically cited “the serious affairs currently under investigation” by the Shin Bet.
Netanyahu subsequently argued that the Qatargate probe was only ordered by Baharav-Miara and begun by Bar to create an ostensible conflict of interest, in which the prime minister could not fire the security chief who was investigating his office. But the timeline the prime minister presented appeared to debunk that claim.
Two days after voting to fire Bar, the cabinet also unanimously voted no-confidence in Baharav-Miara, beginning the formal process for her dismissal too. The Supreme Court has temporarily frozen Bar’s ouster, while it prepares to hear petitions against his firing, and will certainly be asked to weigh in if and when Netanyahu and his colleagues move to fire the attorney general.
The coalition, meanwhile, has revived its package of legislation designed to neuter the Supreme Court, last week passing a law that gives the Knesset far greater control over the appointments of all of Israel’s judges, and declaring its intention to advance legislation radically limiting the top court’s capacity to strike down undemocratic laws and government decisions.
The real hostages
Plainly, a great deal of the complexity surrounding both Qatargate and the case of the stolen and leaked IDF intelligence documents has yet to enter the public domain.
The editor of The Jerusalem Post, Zvika Klein, has found himself drawn into Qatargate, and is reportedly currently under house arrest, for reasons that apparently center on a reporting trip he made to Qatar last year on the invitation of its government. Last time I checked, that does not constitute a criminal act, and his arrest is deeply troubling.
One might have thought that Netanyahu would have been profoundly concerned by the alleged involvement of some of his key aides in both cases. That he would have been extremely dismayed at the allegation that aides were taking money directly and/or indirectly from Qatar — which funds both Hamas and the Al Jazeera TV network that Israel last year banned — and were allegedly issuing pro-Qatar messages, also aimed at skewing public opinion against Egypt, from his own office, during wartime. And that he would have urged the police and Shin Bet to expedite their investigations without fear or favor.
Instead, the prime minister is bent on discrediting both the investigations and the law enforcement officials and hierarchies carrying them out. In a video statement on Monday evening, he repeated the assertion he has used as regards his own criminal trial, that Qatargate is a politically motivated witch hunt designed to oust a right-wing prime minister. And he stooped so low as to claim that “they are holding Jonatan Urich and Eli Feldstein as hostages.”
The Hostages Families Forum, in response, deplored “the prime minister’s unfortunate choice of words.” “Let us remind you that the real hostages are our 59 brothers and sisters who have been held in Gaza for 542 days,” the families noted, urging Netanyahu to focus his attention on seeking to extricate the “real people being held hostage.”
Shin Bet volte-face
Shortly before the legal chaos began playing out on Monday morning, Netanyahu’s office announced that the prime minister had decided to appoint former Navy commander Vice Adm. (res.) Eli Sharvit as Bar’s successor, and said Netanyahu was “convinced that Sharvit is the right person to lead the Shin Bet on a path that will continue the organization’s glorious tradition.”
The appointment was hailed by some of Netanyahu’s leading critics, including ex-chief of staff MK Gadi Eisenkot, as the impressive and appropriate choice of a trusted public servant, albeit one with no directly related experience. It was recalled that another ex-Navy chief outsider, Ami Ayalon, took over the agency in 1995, in the wake of its failure to prevent the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Simple Google searches, however, immediately established that Sharvit had participated in demonstrations against the judicial overhaul — a “crime” for which Israel’s best English-language spokesperson Eylon Levy lost his job last year — and had also penned a Hebrew op-ed in January criticizing US President Donald Trump for his environmental policies. A clamor against the appointment erupted in Netanyahu’s Likud and allied parties — Netanyahu quickly indicated that he was rethinking the appointment, and by Monday night, the prime minister had met with Sharvit and told him he would not be getting the job after all.
It has been speculated that Netanyahu planned the U-turn all along — that he named a reassuring figure to head the agency with the goal of disarming the Supreme Court, who would then be more inclined not to intervene in the firing of Bar, and that he would have then canceled Sharvit’s appointment and appointed a reliable loyalist to head the agency. This seems far-fetched — the justices will presumably center the rulings on the legality of Bar’s dismissal, and requires Netanyahu to have calculated that his base’s furious opposition to Sharvit could be held in check until the justices had their say.
The other speculative argument is that Netanyahu’s office failed to carry out even a rudimentary check into Sharvit’s history — a theory that defies belief given the sensitivity of the job and the ready availability of Sharvit’s internet footprint.
More likely is that Netanyahu indeed wanted to appoint Sharvit — who had previously backed the prime minister in yet another legal imbroglio, over alleged corruption in the purchases of submarines and other vessels — but was surprised and spooked by the ferocity of internal opposition.
Whatever the explanation, the prime minister’s machinations as regards the leadership of a vital security hierarchy are yet another cause for dismay. The Shin Bet’s key role is to keep Israelis safe. Along with the IDF and overseen by the Netanyahu-led political leadership, it failed, utterly, under Bar, to do so on October 7. It thwarts literally dozens of terror attacks and nascent terror plots every week. The careful, considered selection of its chief is a matter of paramount national concern.
‘One massive bluff’
Wednesday morning finds Netanyahu back in that same Tel Aviv courtroom, being questioned again by his lawyer Hadad, in his ongoing corruption trial.
Asked by reporters about Qatargate, he dismisses the affair as “one massive bluff.”
One has to deeply hope so.
Because the allegation that people working for the prime minister were fronting for a country that, to be blunt, would not be unhappy to see Israel destroyed, and skewing opinion and, potentially, policy on defeating Hamas and returning hostages, is almost too horrendous to contemplate.
The trouble is Netanyahu’s airy dismissal of the suspicions, his relentless insistence that police investigators, the Shin Bet leadership, the state prosecution and much of the judiciary are in league to bring him down, and his wild claims of a bureaucratic deep state conspiring against him — when he has held power for more than 14 of the past 16 years — are far more implausible.
“How insane this all is,” said Yair Cherki.
Insane doesn’t begin to cover it.
The Times of Israel Community.