Who’s Afraid of Benjamin Netanyahu?
A dispatch from the longest trial in Israel’s history — on brothers, bribes that aren’t quite bribes, the missing formal model of spin, and the reckoning nobody wants to name.
When God appeared to Moses in the wilderness of Midian, out of a bush that burned and was not consumed, He gave him a task no sane man would want: go down to Egypt, stand before the most powerful ruler on earth, and demand the release of a nation of slaves. Moses did what politicians never do. He begged off. I am slow of speech and slow of tongue, he said. Send someone else.
God’s solution was not to make Moses eloquent. It was to split the task between two brothers. Aaron would be the mouth; Moses would be the burden. “He shall speak for you to the people,” God says in Exodus, “and he shall be a mouth for you, and you shall be as God to him.” One brother carries the word; the other carries the weight.
Understand what a correction this was, and you understand why it is God’s most profound lesson about brotherhood. The entire book before it — Genesis — is a catalogue of brothers destroying each other over election: Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph thrown in the pit by ten of his own. Brotherhood, in Genesis, is a rivalry over who gets chosen. Then Exodus opens, God chooses the younger brother for the greatest commission in history, and tells Moses something unprecedented: Aaron is already walking out to meet you, “and when he sees you, he will be glad in his heart.” Glad. The older brother, passed over, rejoices at the younger’s election — and the rabbis say it was for that gladness of heart that Aaron was given the priestly breastplate to wear over it. This is the lesson: a nation’s deliverance is not entrusted to a man; it is entrusted to a brotherhood, and brotherhood means carrying the half your brother cannot, rejoicing at what he was given instead of you, and covering him at his worst — Aaron lending Moses his voice, Moses pleading Aaron’s life back from God after the golden calf. Each brother is the other’s missing capacity. That is the design, and Genesis’s whole bloody ledger exists so you notice it.
Together they walk into Pharaoh’s court, and together they walk out of Egypt, and — this is the part the Sunday-school version skips — neither of them is permitted to enter the land. Aaron dies on Mount Hor, and it is Moses who climbs the mountain with him, Moses who strips his brother’s garments and dresses the son who will succeed him — the brother buries the brother. Then Moses dies on Nebo, looking across the Jordan at a country he will never touch, with no brother left to bury him; God does it Himself. The task was given to two brothers, and it consumed them both.
Israel has its own pair of brothers, and every Israeli knows the story. On the night of July 4, 1976, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu led the raid on Entebbe, the rescue of more than a hundred hostages from a hijacked Air France flight held at Idi Amin’s airport in Uganda. The operation succeeded almost miraculously. Yoni was the only Israeli soldier killed. He was thirty years old, and he became, more or less instantly, the national symbol of what it means to give everything.
His younger brother lived. The younger brother became the mouth — the polished, gravel-voiced advocate on American television, then ambassador, then minister, then the longest-serving prime minister in the country’s history. If Yoni was Moses, the one who carried the burden into the mountain and never came down, Benjamin was Aaron: the speaker, the survivor, the political animal, the man of the golden calf and the necessary compromise. The task — the state, its survival, its endless argument with itself — passed between them.
And now the surviving brother sits, several days a week, in a courtroom in Jerusalem, answering questions about cigars.
Since May 2020, Benjamin Netanyahu has been on trial in Jerusalem District Court in three consolidated cases, the first sitting Israeli prime minister ever to stand trial. The prosecution has rested; the defense phase, including Netanyahu’s own testimony, grinds on into 2026, with a preemptive pardon request sitting on President Herzog’s desk like an unexploded shell.
The cases are known by numbers, in the bureaucratic poetry of Israeli police files:
Case 1000 , the Gifts Affair: fraud and breach of trust. Over roughly two decades, Netanyahu and his wife Sara received something like $200,000 in cigars, champagne, and jewelry from the Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and the Australian billionaire James Packer — what investigators called a “supply channel.” In exchange, prosecutors allege, Netanyahu pushed tax exemptions that benefited Milchan, lobbied John Kerry for an American visa on his behalf, and leaned on regulators in a media merger. Neither Milchan nor Packer was charged.
Case 2000 , the Media Deal Affair: fraud and breach of trust. Recorded conversations between Netanyahu and Arnon Mozes, publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth , allegedly sketching a trade — friendlier coverage for the Netanyahus in exchange for legislation kneecapping the rival free daily Israel Hayom . No deal was consummated. Mozes was charged with attempted bribery anyway.
Case 4000 , the Bezeq–Walla Affair: the heavy one, the only count of actual bribery. As both prime minister and communications minister, Netanyahu allegedly advanced regulatory decisions worth on the order of half a billion dollars to Bezeq, the telecom giant controlled by Shaul Elovitch. In return, Elovitch and his wife allegedly rode Walla’s editors — texts, calls, real-time interventions — to soften coverage of the Netanyahus and sharpen coverage of their enemies.
Netanyahu denies everything, calls it a witch hunt, and frames the whole edifice as the revenge of a legal establishment that could never beat him at the ballot box.
Here is the question that has hung over the trial for six years, and it is not a partisan question, because serious legal scholars ask it too: what, precisely, is the crime?
Strip away the legalese and much of the indictment describes horse trading — the quid pro quo lubricant that politics has run on since Pharaoh’s court. You scratch my back with coverage; I scratch yours with regulation. Rich friends give lavish gifts; powerful friends make helpful calls. In most democracies this lives in a gray zone managed by ethics rules, disclosure forms, and the occasional scandal, not by criminal indictment of a sitting head of government.
The American approach, whatever its hypocrisies, at least has the virtue of bright lines. A mayor in the United States typically operates under a hard gift cap — fifty dollars here, two hundred fifty there — from anyone doing business with the city. Congress bans nearly all gifts from lobbyists outright. Cross the number, and you have a problem; stay under it, and you’re merely unseemly. The rule is arbitrary, but it is a rule , knowable in advance.
Israeli law offers no such comfort. The operative offense in two of the three cases, “breach of trust,” is famously elastic — a doctrine that says a public servant must act for the public and not for personal benefit, judged after the fact by prosecutors and courts on “reasonableness” and pattern. There is no cutoff at which a friend’s gift becomes a supply channel, no threshold at which twenty years of cigars stops being ceremony between rich men and starts being a criminal enterprise. Netanyahu’s defenders argue, with some force, that the duration of the gift-giving cuts for him, not against: bribes are furtive and transactional; a two-decade open habit between old friends looks like elite social ritual, the Davos handshake stretched over a generation. The prosecution flips it — the very continuity, they say, is what normalized the corruption, turning influence into an entitlement that flowed alongside official favors.
Both readings are coherent. That is the problem. When a criminal statute can absorb either interpretation of the same facts, the line between prosecution and persecution is drawn by discretion, and discretion is exactly what half the country no longer trusts.
Case 4000 raises an even stranger question: can favorable news coverage be a bribe ?
Israeli bribery law defines the corrupt payment broadly — “anything of value” exchanged for an official act — and in a small country where a single news portal can shape a coalition, media influence is unquestionably valuable. The prosecution’s evidence is a mosaic: editors testifying to relentless pressure from above, text messages demanding headlines be softened or stories killed, interventions timed suspiciously against regulatory decisions.
But spin is not a binary. Every outlet spins; framing, emphasis, and placement are the daily craft of journalism, and Walla ran plenty of stories the Netanyahus hated. There exists no formal model of spin — no sentiment baseline, no algorithmic scorecard, no legally defined threshold at which “better coverage” becomes “a thing of value corruptly received.” What exists instead is qualitative evidence: witnesses recalling that they felt pressured, messages that read as menace to one judge and as ordinary flackery to another, timelines that look damning in hindsight and coincidental in real time. Some of those witnesses testified under agreements with the state; others carried grudges. Human memory, elite grievance, and prosecutorial narrative-building all flow into the same record.
To the trial’s skeptics, this is where the case dissolves into vibes — an attempt to criminalize the ordinary, ugly intimacy between politicians and the press by declaring, retroactively and without a codified standard, that this particular intimacy went too far. To its defenders, the mosaic is the crime: bribery among sophisticated people never comes with an invoice, and demanding one would legalize every corrupt bargain conducted with a wink instead of a wire transfer.
The rejoinder to “cases like this never go anywhere” has a name: Ehud Olmert. Netanyahu’s predecessor was convicted of bribery in the Holyland affair — hundreds of thousands of dollars, disguised as fees and favors, flowing to him while he was mayor of Jerusalem in exchange for zoning decisions that inflated a hideous real-estate project on the city’s skyline. He went to prison. Israeli courts have also twice convicted Aryeh Deri, the perennial Shas leader, and a long procession of mayors and ministers besides. The system does convict its own.
But Holyland was money for permits — corruption in its classical form, hidden payments tethered to specific official acts. The Netanyahu cases ask the courts to go somewhere murkier: to find bribery in headlines and breach of trust in friendship. And it is worth pausing on who brought them there. The indictment was not the work of the opposition. It was filed by Avichai Mandelblit — Netanyahu’s own hand-picked attorney general, a former cabinet secretary widely seen as close to the prime minister — who called the day he announced the charges a heavy and sad one. Whatever this prosecution is, it is not a Likud project, and it is not a simple leftist plot; it is the professional legal machinery of the state turning, with visible reluctance, on the man who sat atop it.
To see how strangely the world reads Netanyahu, hold him up against the other wartime leader of the age: Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy is a comedian who became the West’s icon of martial resolve. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, he has governed under martial law, postponed elections, banned parties deemed pro-Russian, and folded his country’s broadcasters into a single unified telethon — measures that, described in the abstract, would read as an authoritarian checklist. Ukraine’s wartime years have also produced their own procurement scandals and corruption purges, some reaching into his inner circle. And nearly all of it has been absorbed, forgiven, contextualized: a nation under attack gets latitude; you judge the hawk by the sky he flies in. When Zelenskyy refuses to trust Russian promises, no one calls it pathology.
Netanyahu is denied that method of reading. “Hawkish” attaches to him not as circumstance but as temperament — a personality flaw with a foreign policy — as though the sky he flies in were a stage set. But run the same contextual exercise honestly. A state narrower at its waist than many commutes, ringed by actors formally committed to its elimination; Iran and its proxy arc; the massacre of October 7; and, beneath the geopolitics, the personal fact this dispatch opened with — a brother who boarded a plane to Uganda to rescue hostages from hijackers and came home in a coffin. Netanyahu did not adopt hawkishness as a brand. He inherited it, the way Zelenskyy’s Ukraine inherited its distrust of Moscow, from an event that made trust look like negligence. One can dispute every policy that flows from that inheritance — plenty of Israelis do, loudly — while still conceding that the hawk has a context, and that stripping it away is not analysis but caricature.
Zelenskyy’s emergency arrived, as the world chose to date it, in a single February dawn; his critics ask when it will end, not whether he engineered its continuation. Netanyahu’s harshest critics — including former heads of his own security services — allege something darker: that a man on trial has a structural incentive to keep the emergency alive, because war postpones hearings, glues coalitions, and reframes a defendant as a commander-in-chief. That accusation may be unjust. It is also the mirror image of the grace extended to Kyiv: in one capital, crisis is presumed to explain the leader’s choices; in the other, the leader is presumed to explain the crisis. Whichever presumption is right, the asymmetry itself is the tell. The world decided what kind of hawk each man was before examining the sky.
The legal establishment fears him — fears, specifically, what it would mean if a leader this dominant, this durable, this skilled at bending institutions toward himself, could operate above the reach of the vague statutes that are the only statutes Israel has. The opposition fears that acquittal or pardon would ratify a decade of erosion. Netanyahu’s supporters fear the mirror image: that an unelected caste of prosecutors and judges has discovered it can criminalize the normal texture of politics whenever the wrong man wins, and that “breach of trust” is a weapon that will be aimed, forever after, at whoever the bureaucracy dislikes. And the country itself is afraid of the verdict — any verdict — because the trial long ago stopped being about cigars and became a referendum on who ultimately rules Israel: the ballot box or the bench. The judicial-reform crisis that convulsed the country did not happen adjacent to this trial. It happened because of it.
Abroad, the fear takes yet another shape: the world fears the hawk it declined to contextualize, which is a convenient fear, because a caricature never requires you to argue with its reasons.
There is also the fear no cross-examination can touch. Somewhere beneath the defense’s legal arguments runs an unspoken moral ledger, the one every Israeli can recite without being asked: this is the family that gave Yoni. What could the state possibly claim this man took from it, the argument whispers, when the account already shows what his family paid in? It is a rhetorically devastating line and a legally worthless one — no court weighs Entebbe against Bezeq’s regulatory file, nor should it. Sacrifice is not a license, and heroism is not heritable immunity. But the whisper explains why the trial cuts so deep. It asks whether a state may hold to account a man whose family mythology is braided into the state’s own.
Miserable scavengers appoint themselves a political color, obsessed with themselves and what others have built. They hunt for any perceived stumble and run toward it, collapsing even legitimate critique into “Jews are malevolently bad — by simply existing.” Diaspora is existential, as is a bullet, a bomb, a hedge fund, etc. What makes one open to criticism is if the why lacks sufficient explanation. The mimicry is the obsession of the self — obsession with the self mimics being miserable, and mimicry of what is miserable is how one becomes miserable. Rehearse it long enough and the mask grows into the face. And a mind so made produces miserable conclusions with the reliability of a machine, whatever assignment du jour is stamped on the casing: Jewish bankers. Faked genocides. Two fantasies wearing different jerseys, marching in different parades, certain they are enemies — and they are the same product, because the factory is the same. The convergence is not a coincidence of opposites meeting. It exists because the factions assign themselves: the conclusion was on the line first, and the politics were draped over it afterward, like a tarp.
What Benjamin Netanyahu supplied was a license. The prominence is his — built across fifty years, on purpose, by a man who intended to be exactly this consequential and executed the intention — and spare the dispatch the objection that he therefore courted what came. Suppose he courted it. A man handed the task of existence itself on the night his brother was wiped off the earth may court whatever he pleases; the objection is meaningless, because taking up that task was never separable from standing where it is dangerous to stand. And more than permitted — it is doctrine. You win a war by getting in front of it, not as a lie but as a tactic as consequential as air support: the man who makes himself the face of the confrontation concentrates the enemy’s attention, sets the terms of the fight, and draws onto one silhouette the fire that would otherwise fall across a nation. His brother executed the doctrine in its literal form at Entebbe — the commander goes first, and the cost of going first is being the one who is hit. Benjamin has run the political version of the same maneuver for fifty years: the podiums, the speeches delivered over every ally’s objection, the decades of placing his own face in front of every war his country was in so that the war would wear his face instead of theirs. Two brothers, one doctrine, two theaters. Visibility explains where the scavengers aim. It has never once explained why they shoot; the why predates him by centuries and would have found another summit. Here at last was a named, individual, electorally accountable, criminally indicted target onto whom the feeling could be poured without penalty. Pour it onto the man, and no one can accuse you of pouring it onto the people. He is the punching bag every jersey was green-lit to share — the single point where people who call each other enemies discover they have always agreed, which should have been the giveaway: when self-declared opposites reach identical conclusions about the same people, the declared politics were never doing the work.
And do not reach for the usual five-syllable word — not out of delicacy, but because it is not a serious instrument. It is a verdict administered rather than derived: applied here, waived there, on no mechanism its administrators can state, which is how one drawer comes to hold the anonymous account blaming Jews for the weather, the harvest, and the interest rate — the genuine article, cheap and everywhere — filed beside whichever critic the administrators woke up disliking. The guilty and the merely disliked, together, isolating neither. And here is the tell: go looking for the word’s serious anchor, the paradigm case that would earn the category, and it is not readily available. Every famous exhibit, inspected, resolves into something that already has a better name — an account, a forgery, an edict, a devotion, a fever. None of which means the thing is not real. The thing is real — older than the word and realer. What is not real is the cartoon the conventional understanding demands as its exemplar: the loveless monster, made purely of the one feeling. Reality declines to supply him. The genuine articles arrive with working faculties — devoted men, capable of love, who aimed the entire capacity at the abyss — while the loveless ones, the accounts blaming Jews for the weather, love nothing at all, their own idols included. The tradition never needed the word anyway; it keeps older names, earned by mechanics — Amalek, Haman, the one who rises in every generation — assigned by what was done, and how, and why, never by committee. But a word that cannot tell devotion from vacancy cannot cut, and a word that cannot cut cannot diagnose; this one has been swung as cudgel and raised as shield until the edge went entirely. It is past rehabilitation. At street level, call it what it is — Jew hating nonsense — and for serious analysis, name it by its actual mechanics: the weaponization of commitment and utility.
There is one word worth rehabilitating, though, and it is slur . The word has a known defect: its usage is bound by authority, and the authority’s foundation is preference — a committee somewhere rules on what wounds, and the ruling binds until the committee’s composition changes. But meaning and usage have a final arbiter that outranks every committee, and it is mechanics: what am I looking at, how does it work, why. Rebase the word on those three questions and it turns precise. A slur is an accusation that skips the mechanism — a verdict with no what, no how, no why, only the assertion of badness and the standing of the asserter. “Jew bad, by existing” is a slur under this definition. And so is its respectable cousin, pronounced in better rooms with cleaner hands: the law says the man might be bad. For all the solemn talk of holding accusations as serious, pending things until the process completes, the talk is horseshit the moment no one can answer the three questions — and the first half of this dispatch is a record of no one answering them: no formal model of spin, no threshold at which a gift becomes a channel, no metric on which coverage becomes currency, a statute elastic enough to convict a mood. An indictment brandished as a finding is not law; it is a slur wearing a robe — and of the two cousins it is the more contemptible, because it borrows the prestige of mechanism while producing none. “The law says he might be bad” and “Jew bad” are the same object: a conclusion without machinery. One of them merely dressed for court.
Who is doing the punching? The confidence of the pile-on runs inversely to the ledger of the piler-on. The verdicts arrive from people who have never read a book in their life; prejudgment and condemnation is coming from those that have never met payroll never built an institution, never carried a country through a war, and never buried a brother whose death an entire nation still carries. They have risked nothing, and from that position of perfect safety they pronounce upon a man whose family account was settled at Entebbe. The question asked earlier was what the state could claim he took from it. The wider version of the question is what the world imagines it is owed by him.
The rootless cosmopolitan who belongs nowhere and therefore runs everything. The eternal usurer who turns every crisis into interest. The Hollywood rabbi who decides what the culture is allowed to desire. The lobby that writes the foreign policy of nations it does not live in. Configured slop by the most unkempt of minds. A man who sees purchase behind everything is telling you how his own attachments are priced; these are people who would sell their mothers for a shiny button, and so they assume the world is inventory — every gift a payment, every friendship a position, every act of commitment a scheme with a margin. Duty is not something they reject. It is something they cannot read. Brotherhood is not something they oppose. It is a grammar they were never taught. Show them a man who boarded a plane for Uganda knowing the commander goes first, and they will look for the angle. Show them the brother who carried both halves of the task for fifty years, and they will ask who financed it. And this is the ugliest resonance of the whole affair: an indictment that renders friendship as bribery and loyalty as consideration reads, to the scavenger, like a document composed at last in his native tongue — which is why he celebrates it without ever having examined it. The transaction is the only story he can follow.
And the grammar problem is not theoretical; it walks into rooms. When the podcast circuit got its sittings with him — cameras, mood lighting, men whose profession is the performance of candor — one of them, Tim Pool, came away describing a disconnect he could only name as deception: something in the encounter didn’t add up, something was being run on him. Grant him the sensation; it was honest. The interpretation was inverted. A performer assumes performance, because performance is the only labor he knows; seat him across from a man who is not performing — a man between a morning in the dock and an afternoon running a war, holding the same brief he has held for fifty years, purchased at the price of a brother — and the sheer density of the sincerity registers as technique. Phonies being spoken to by a man at work will always report a strange feeling, and they will always file it under deception, because the alternative filing — that they were the only fabricated thing in the room — does not exist in their cabinet.
Which brings the argument to the one count on which it will convict, the single genuinely self-inflicted wound, worse as strategy than any war and every cigar: somewhere along the line, it was decided to pay people to say nice things. Sponsored trips, funded creators, affection with an invoice number. Of all the things Israel has done, this is the worst, because it is the only one that confirms the scavenger’s grammar — the man who insists all loyalty is purchased was finally, after five centuries of forged receipts, handed a real one. And the asymmetry makes it indefensible even as tactics: the other side’s army works for free. The miserable volunteer. No one has ever needed to invoice a scavenger; the obsession is self-funding — and do not call it hatred, because people incapable of love cannot hate. Scavengers neither hate nor love; they occupy the ground where life once stood, life in its most vibrant and beautiful configuration, and the occupation runs on its own fumes. Against that perpetual-motion machine, someone put friendship on a payment schedule. The Bauhaus is forgivable — barely, whole hillsides of it, the White City squinting into the sun. This is not. Don’t pay anyone to be your friend. Demand they prove it. Friendship that arrives with a rate card is the scavenger’s own product with better branding, and a nation founded on the lesson of Aaron’s glad heart — the elder brother who rejoiced for free — should have known, of all nations, that the one asset which cannot be procured is the one the entire story was about.
No matter the manner or length of a critique, the why of it is what matters, as this provides for absolute legitimacy of the critique itself. The Israeli in the street arguing appointments, hostages, and budgets has a why with a paper trail; argue back, that is what the street is for. Criticism has reasons. But a surplus has a source, and the surplus is now the thing demanding explanation. Explain the excess — why the loathing of this one man exceeds any sober assessment of his record; why it unites factions that call themselves enemies; why leaders with darker ledgers on every continent draw a fraction of the heat; why the world’s patience for wartime emergency, so generously extended to Kyiv, evaporates precisely at Jerusalem’s city limits. Criticism accounts for some of the temperature. It does not account for the fever. And the fever will not be diagnosed by a five-hundred-year-old word worn smooth from misuse; it is diagnosed by what it does — it consumes the commitment, invoices the committed, and calls the arithmetic justice.
Return, at the end, to the brothers in the wilderness. The division of labor God imposed on Moses and Aaron was never clean. Aaron, the mouth, was also the one who caved to the crowd and cast the golden calf — the compromiser whose compromises kept the people together and stained him forever. Moses, the burden-carrier, struck the rock in anger when he was told to speak to it. For that single blurring of instruction, both brothers were barred from the land. The Torah’s verdict is severe and strange: the greater the task entrusted, the narrower the margin for how it is carried out. Proximity to the sacred does not relax the standard. It raises it.
That, in the end, is the prosecution’s whole theory, translated out of the statute books: that the man who is the government cannot trade the government’s favors, even for something as gaseous as a headline, even with old friends, even after everything. And the defense’s whole theory is the ancient counter-cry of Aaron’s heirs: that governing is done by mouths, among men, through relationships and favors and imperfect bargains, and that a law vague enough to condemn all of it will be enforced only against some of us.
Both cannot be fully right. The Jerusalem District Court will eventually choose, unless a pardon chooses first. But whichever way it falls, return once more to the lesson the story was built to teach. God did not entrust the deliverance to a man; He entrusted it to brothers, because the task of a nation’s existence is too heavy for one set of shoulders and too important for rivalry — each brother the other’s missing capacity, each the other’s cover at his worst. Israel’s pair received the same commission and a crueler split: one brother’s half ended on a runway in Uganda when he was thirty, and the survivor has carried both halves ever since — the mouth forced to also be the burden, the Aaron who had to become his own Moses, fifty years without the brother whose gladness of heart was supposed to walk out and meet him. Whatever the court decides about the cigars, that is the ledger the scavengers have never once read. Moses and Aaron completed the task. The people crossed over. The brothers didn’t. History has a way of taking everything from the men it gives everything to — and of arguing, forever afterward, about whether they were owed more or less than they got.
And the man himself? He works. Watch any week of the past six years: testimony in the morning, war cabinet by afternoon, a phone that never stops carrying the weight of a country between sessions about champagne. He works as a man who knows it is horseshit — not performing innocence, which is what the guilty do, but the other thing: a man who ran the three questions on his own indictment, found no machinery in it, and concluded that the only remaining variable is time. He’s got work to do. The precipice does not recess.
Now the confession, in full, in the first person, because a confession in dispatch-voice is an alibi. I held Netanyahu to the same standard I held Zelenskyy. Same test, same three questions, same refusal to be charmed. I understood the story about his brother — understood it early and understood it completely — and I still withheld, because agreement before concessions is irrational. Support granted before the argument has conceded anything is not judgment; it is fandom, and fandom is not owed to men with armies.
But the boards are different, and I read them as the same board. Israel sits forever on a precipice with a nuclear Iran at the bottom of it, and America needed exactly one ally on earth willing to stop that program with something firmer than communiqués. Israel served the role. Netanyahu was the role. Putin, meanwhile, does not plan in decades; he plans in centuries, and Ukraine’s resistance is priced accordingly — priced so high that Ukraine’s corruption, which is real, documented, and severe, passes through the world’s attention like a fart in the window: noted, waved off, forgiven by context. Whether that forgiveness is earned — let it lie. The method is all this argument borrows: context is how wartime nations get read. But then the cigars got six years of hearings, and I ran the asymmetry test on the whole world in Section VI and forgot to run it on myself.
I was wrong. Bibi deserved my full support — not the audited, conditional, withheld-until-concessions kind; the full kind — and he deserved it while carrying both halves of a two-brother task through six years of cross-examination about gifts. Set him beside the current inventory of leaders across Europe, across Asia, across most capitals one could name, and the trade is not close. Ask only the question countries actually live or die by — who do you want holding the wheel on the worst night of your history — and the answer, for anyone honest about the worst night his country actually had, and the nights his family already paid for, is the defendant.
So answer the title, since it was always driving here. Who’s afraid of Benjamin Netanyahu? Not me. Not anyone who has read the ledger. The enemies of Israel and America should be — they have been for fifty years, and they have been right every time.
And one final count on the world’s indictment, the one the papers genuinely ran: it is said that when he visits Washington, he arrives with bags of laundry and lets Blair House clean them on the American taxpayer’s dime. The man carrying the Iranian file for the free world, the one ally who would actually act, the survivor of a two-brother task — caught freeloading starch. Lock him up. Somewhere in a Jerusalem courtroom there is, hypothetically, a potato knish from Yonah Schimmel’s on East Houston Street — smuggled in illegally, still warm, with his name on it; and if the name over the bakery door happens to be a form of his brother’s, that is the kind of coincidence this dispatch has learned not to call one. America can cover the shirts; it got the better end of that trade by several wars. No charge for the dry cleaning.
The trial of Benjamin Netanyahu continues in Jerusalem District Court. He denies all charges, and is presumed innocent unless and until convicted. The prosecution’s answer to every argument above is on the record — recordings, regulatory files, the testimony of the editors who were there — and it deserves to be read in full. Some questions belong to the court. The rest were asked here.
