Netanyahu calls media bribery charges ocean of absurdity in dramatic first day of testimony

His trial is a “chance to refute these ridiculous charges” against him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Jerusalem District Court as he became the first sitting prime minister in Israeli history to testify in a public corruption trial on Tuesday.

"I waited eight years for this,” he said, "to say the truth as I remember." He called the charges "an ocean of absurdity."

Netanyahu criticized the timing of the trial while Israel is at war: "I am the prime minister, and I am managing a country and the IDF during a war." He said that he "thought the court could have balanced [his] time better than [making him] testify three times per week."

He also referenced that, while he hoped to be able to run the country and testify in tandem, the events in Syria had shifted the balance in the region.

"A few days ago, a tectonic event happened that hasn't happened in 100 years since Sykes-Picot,” referring to the 1916 agreement that divided the Ottoman provinces into areas of British and French control.

"I never believed volunteering to serve this country would lead to this," he said.

Netanyahu also claimed that if he had followed the "leftist" way, he would not be on trial: "They told me ‘make a Palestinian state and give them half of Jerusalem.’ Because I rejected this, the media hated me. If I accepted two states and ignored the threat of Iran and went a few steps left, I would have been applauded."

He reiterated the need for Israel to be strong militarily and economically, and spoke of his own desire to withstand global and domestic pressure.

"I make contact with families of the Israeli hostages, not to score political points, but because of true commitment to my country," he continued.

He stressed that his return to politics at the age of 50 was not for fraudulent reasons or to get benefits, but to help his country more, adding that this decision caused suffering to his wife.

Case 1000 is where everything began, and it may be where Netanyahu is in most danger of a conviction, even if the charges are less sensational. Netanyahu was charged with accepting over $100,000 in gifts from Arnon Milchan and James Parker in return for regulatory policies that benefited them.

Referencing the charges of bribery via cigars and champagne from Case 1000, the prime minister said he "never gets to consistently smoke [his] cigars."

"I am always interrupted. By the way, I hate champagne."

Speaking about his schedule, he said he smokes some but doesn't eat "super fancy" food and does eat at work. He said he works all around the clock, often until two in the morning, and never sees his kids, calling it "a big price to pay."

Foreign relations

Netanyahu claimed he had to freeze building [infrastructure] "for almost a year to deal with [then-president Barack] Obama," though "eventually [I] was able to double the size of Jewish West Bank settlements."

He added that Obama's view that there should be no Israeli building near Palestinians "went directly against the ideas which I believed in."

He also criticized the way in which Obama saw Iran as an "opportunity" and the former president's attempts to make a nuclear deal with the regime.

The media

He said the media fails to represent all sectors of the public, and is left-leaning. This creates a "massive dissonance between left-wing media and regular Israelis."

The prime minister added that the current media acts as if an Iranian nuclear deal is a good thing, and that if Gaza and Lebanon were to be left alone, "all will be fine." 

Netanyahu continued by saying that when the world only hears left-wing media and that we are committing war crimes, global media thinks this represents the majority of Israelis.

He also claimed that Israeli media is helping to cement and fuel The Hague's [ICC] war crime accusations against Israel.

Overall, Netanyahu said he felt there needed to be more diversity of views in Israeli media, and better "manners." On Monday night, the prime minister held a heated press conference with the press, which he alluded to in his testimony. "Reporters don't come to listen to answers," he said, "just to cut you off." He added that wanting support for his policies [in the media] was not for personal gain, but because he wanted to more effectively deliver his message.

He recommended bringing in new investors to diversify media platforms and stressed the importance of Channel 14 for maintaining balanced views.

Netanyahu testified on Tuesday, "The criminalization of relations between politicians and the media is dangerous to Israeli democracy," adding that the fathers of democracy were Americans Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, each of whom made their own newspapers to attack each other and also picked their own editors. 

He asked rhetorically, "Do we think they were corrupt? They were great men with great values who we learn from."

Netanyahu was arguing that the prosecution going after him and his lieutenants for trying to intervene in the appointments of various editors at Walla, such as Tali Ben Ovadiah, would be tantamount to declaring that Hamilton and Jefferson perpetrated media bribery when they tried to create favorable media outlets for themselves.

Just as Netanyahu believes most people would reject declaring such luminaries of democracy as corrupt, he hopes the court will view his or his lieutenant's interventions with editor appointments at Walla as something that cannot be corrupt.

Elovitch and media bribery 

Addressing the prosecution's claims in Case 4000, where the prime minister is accused of helping Shaul Elovitch’s Bezeq in return for good coverage from Elovitch’s Walla, Netanyahu testified that he did not know Elovitch very well before or even in 2012 and that he had approved regulatory policies which seemed to show he was pro-reforms.

The indictment said that Elovitch and Netanyahu hatched the beginning of the media bribery scheme during a four person dinner with their wives on December 27, 2012.

Netanyahu said that he did not meet with Elovitch any more frequently than he did with former chief justice Aharon Barak, who is now thought of as a major rival. Adding in Barak was to contextualize Elovitch as not a close ally, and certainly not someone he would scheme with.

Next, the defense and Netanyahu presented a regulatory memorandum, which the prime minister signed off on when he stood in as communications minister.

The memoranda were in favor of Elovitch, but occurred two-and-a-half years before the alleged scheme was hatched, at a time when Netanyahu was not seen as close to Elovitch.

The prime minister said that the police declined to show him these memoranda.

Judge Moshe Baram seemed highly surprised that the memoranda had not been produced in the case previously, but Netanyahu’s defense lawyer Amit Hadad said that his three -person team of defense lawyers only found it recently, noting that the prosecution has over 20 lawyers and “could conquer a small village.”

Baram said the memoranda were very relevant.

Defense lawyer

Netanyahu's defense lawyer Amit Hadad told the Jerusalem District Court that the police approach against the prime minister was similar to that of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, who told his underlings to create crimes to prosecute his opposition figures if they could not find existing crimes.

Hadad told the court that his defense would start with Case 4000 (Media Bribery Walla-Bezeq), then move on to Case 1000 (Illegal Gifts), and conclude with Case 2000 (attempted Media Bribery – Yediot Aharonot-Israel Hayom).

Netanyahu is the first sitting prime minister to testify in his own public corruption trial, in a drama that is expected to take over the country’s narrative for the next month, or several months, sidelining what the master messenger wants the national story to be.

The defense lawyer told the Jerusalem District Court that this case started five years ago when the prosecution said there was a connection between the three cases.

“This never happened. Nothing that the prosecution mentioned in its opening has been proven – despite the complete collapse in parts of the indictment,” especially with state’s witness Shlomo Filber and “despite the court's suggestion to the prosecution to drop the bribery charge in Case 4000… we are proud to present Netanyahu's truth and narrative,” he said.

Netanyahu’s lawyer added that the defense has found more and more holes in the prosecution’s case to show the court.

He stated that this shows how lost the prosecution and police were and the absence of limits of the police in pressuring witnesses.

Next, Hadad said that former attorney-general Avichai Mandelblit filed the indictment against Netanyahu on the day that the prime minister met with then-president Donald Trump in 2020.

He claimed that this showed how political the case was.

It is worth noting that the prosecution had wanted to file the case months before, but Netanyahu had delayed this with procedural motions regarding alleged immunity.

The defense opened its case around four-and-a-half years after the prosecution opened its case and seven years after the investigations started, with many observers critical that the court has not moved the case along faster to quickly end this divisive episode in the country's history.

The return of his public corruption trial, after essentially a recess since the summer to give Netanyahu and his lawyers more time to prepare, includes Cases 1000, 2000 and 4000.

Following Hadad presenting Netanyahu's narrative of the cases involved, the prime minister will be cross-examined by a variety of different prosecution lawyers.

Although the prosecution has not said yet who will handle the cross-examination, the lead lawyer for all cases has been Deputy State Attorney Liat Ben Ari; the lead lawyer for the largest case, Case 4000, has been Yehudit Tirosh; and the lead lawyer for Cases 1000 and 2000 has been Alon Gildin.

Jerusalem District Court President Judge Rivkah Friedman Feldman – who convicted former prime minister Ehud Olmert of corruption around a decade ago – rejected several Netanyahu postponement requests as well as requests from members of his government, after granting his initial request to delay from the summer until December 2 due to the war.

In late November, Friedman Feldman finally gave the prime minister a one-week reprieve, bringing the trial up to Tuesday’s main event, but that week did not really give Netanyahu any relief.

Judges Moshe Baram and Oded Shaham have also presided over the trial along with Friedman-Feldman.

The highlights of the prosecution case from a legal perspective have been the testimony of former Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua; the text messages between Yeshua and former Bezeq and Walla owner Shaul Elovitch; a string of former Walla reporters; former top aides to Netanyahu Nir Hefetz, Shlomo Filber, and Ari Harow; former communications ministry officials, such as former director-general Avi Berger, Hadas Klein, and Arnon Milchin; text messages from former Netanyahu aide Zev Rubinstein; former Netanyahu aide and cousin David Shimron; and a variety of police interrogators, most notably Yoav Telem and Eli Asiag.

Some other political highlights in the case – the drama of which has grabbed the country’s attention now and then, even if their impact on the legal outcome was more minor – included testimony from no less than former prime minister Yair Lapid, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, sitting Justice Minister Yariv Levin, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Gilad Erdan. Former US secretary of state John Kerry was only able to avoid testifying because the US government refused Israel’s request to involve him in the trial.

Of all of these massive numbers of witnesses and developments, the most important witnesses, legally speaking, have been Hefetz and Filber in Case 4000 – both formerly very close to Netanyahu and both of whom received immunity in exchange for pointing the finger at their former boss of many years, and Hadas Klein in Case 1000 – the key witness regarding alleged illegal gifts to Milchin and tycoon James Packer.

Case 1000

Case 1000 is where everything began, and it may be where Netanyahu is in most danger of a conviction, even if the charges are less sensational.

Netanyahu allegedly received NIS 267,254 ($75,800) in cigars and NIS 184,448 ($52,300) worth of champagne from billionaire Milchan between 2011 and 2016. The original indictment said that Sara Netanyahu had allegedly received NIS 10,900 ($3,100) worth of jewelry from him in the same period, although later allegations pushed that number up to over $45,000. Netanyahu and his family also allegedly received another NIS 229,174 ($65,000) in champagne and cigars from Milchan’s associate, Australian billionaire Packer, between 2014 and 2016.

Klein has been the key witness to connect the dots between these former tycoon allies of Netanyahu and the alleged illegal gifts in Case 1000.

Case 4000

Case 4000 was originally the most threatening case with the most serious charge – bribery – but it has faced lots of problems. Hefetz assisted the prosecution and remained more solid than expected under cross-examination; while Filber upset the prosecution so much that they declared him a hostile witness, ended his immunity deal, and likely plan to prosecute him in the future.

Hefetz provided the prosecution’s narrative regarding allegations against Netanyahu on the Walla side of the case: that the prime minister used Elovitch and Yeshua to manipulate coverage of him and his political rivals in around 300 instances.

The defense managed to challenge some of the instances and show that Netanyahu’s rivals sometimes also played games manipulating coverage of themselves, but if the court accepts even a majority of the instances, the volume of coverage manipulation by the prime minister would drown out what his rivals have managed to achieve.

Filber was supposed to close the circle by providing the prosecution narrative against Netanyahu on the Bezeq side, namely that he allegedly used his powers over communications policies to benefit the communications company to the tune of hundreds of millions of shekels – or more.

Given that Elovitch owned both Bezeq and Walla, Netanyahu would have been benefiting Elovitch’s right hand so that he could essentially benefit Netanyahu with his left hand.

Filber was also supposed to testify that shortly after, on June 7, 2015, he was called to a special meeting with the prime minister, during which the scheme was hatched. But he ended up calling into doubt the date of the meeting, as well as whether Netanyahu’s instructions to him were merely designed to help Elovitch or were also good policy. If they were also good policy, then much of Case 4000, certainly the most serious and jail-worthy bribery charge, falls apart.

Netanyahu is expected to testify that he was close friends with Milchin and Packer and that any gifts they gave him - no matter how expensive - were in the context of that friendship.

He is also expected to claim that any actions he took in favor of Milchin had nothing to do with the gifts and were the correct policy regarding the issue in question or rewarded for contributions that Milchin made to Israeli national security.

His biggest problem with those claims will be that Klein has testified of instances where both the prime minister and his wife, Sara Netanyahu, made demands to receive gifts, even when their billionaire allies did not seem to want to continue the gift-giving train.

Likewise, Netanyahu will argue in Case 4000 that trying to influence media coverage at Walla to be less biased against oneself is standard for nearly all politicians and that any policy moves made in favor of Bezeq were the right policies, or that he did not know about all of the actions taken by his subordinates on the issue.

He will have to contend with Hefetz's testimony contradicting his narrative as well as parts of Filber's testimony and others contradicting it.

Case 2000 is the weakest of the cases and is expected to take up less of the prime minister's testimony in court.

The defense case probably will not close before the end of 2025 or even the end of 2026, and the closing arguments and expected appeal will draw the saga out even longer.