Persecuting, not Prosecuting the Prime Minister of Israel

"I'm simply astonished by the magnitude of the absurdity. And, I must say also the magnitude of the injustice."

It's an ocean of absurdity and I want to talk about it. I want to testify."

"I lead the State of Israel and the Israeli army on seven fronts [and] a few days ago, a tectonic thing happened here, an earthquake that hasn't happened in a century ... and now it happened in one fell swoop."

"And this thing [in Syria] changes reality."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference in Jerusalem, December 9, 2024. Maya Alleruzzo/Pool via REUTERS

 

A Prime Minister of a country at war, a war that has spread to include several countries surrounding Israel, from its south to its north, orchestrated by another country whose goal is to destroy the Jewish State with the aid of its proxies. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthies, the Syrian state, and the mastermind behind them all, the Islamic Republic of Iran have all had to be contended with by this man and his ruling cabinet, devising strategies, committing themselves and Israel to choices they hope and pray will protect its people, while at the same time focusing on the return of Israelis taken hostage by a terrorist group and its supporters.

The Herculean task of managing all of this, along with attempts to assure its less hostile neighbours that Israel's intentions are purely self-defensive. While simultaneously struggling to defend its honour and its UN-soiled reputation among both allies and detractors. Has there ever been another nation whose efforts at defense have been as hamstrung as Israel's? When its major benefactor feels entitled to place the country's existential response to terror seeking its obliteration under its final command, withholding vital munitions to coerce compliance?

 

All these issues juggled and considered, analyzed and discussed, decisions made in the hope that they will in the final analysis be helpful in securing a future for the tiny geographical enclave, suffocated by the overwhelming presence of a comparative gargantuan presence of another religion, culture, heritage, ethnic and ideological system alien and hostile to its own. A Prime Minister who has been stalked and accused and threatened by judicial action of a politicized, bitter opponent.

 

Under such duress that would crack the resolve and capability of  any lesser man, ordered to report for ongoing interrogation by law wielded by those whose animus toward Benjamin Netanyahu knows no bounds of decency, proportion and perspective, demanding that with this weight of responsibility to a nation on his back, he must regardless appear three times weekly for six-hour interrogations by mind-numbingly insensitive and oblivious members of the Tel Aviv District Court prosecution.

 

Which is where, after years of aggravated judicial assault, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his testimony of self-defense against charges of corruption reflecting three suits brought against him close to five years earlier, by prosecutors. Despite the Prime Minister's consistent denials of the allegations lodged against him, denouncing the oppressive drive to convict him as representing political persecution, he focused on the "absurdity" of those cases and the trial's timing coinciding with the conflict with Hamas and the tenuous ceasefire with Hezbollah, added to the collapsed dictatorship of Syria's Bashar al-Assad. 

Despite the lawyers representing the Israeli Prime Minister requesting delays in his testimony, they were rejected by the court which has brought bribery and breach-of-trust charges against him in three cases, named and differentiated as 1000, 2000, and 4000. The Likud Party and its coalition partners, along with some opposition politicians dismiss the trial as a partisan effort at government change by ex-parliamentary methods. 

The prosecution ignored the advice rendered to them in June of 2023 when the judges advised the prosecution to drop the charges, citing "difficulties" in establishing guilt. This is a roadshow unworthy of the Jewish state, whose leftist politicians and population have besmirched themselves by an agenda of legalized slander, in the process endangering the country as a whole at a critical time of its embattled existence. Nothing less than shameful.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu smiles as he prepares to testify in his trial on corruption charges at the district court in Tel Aviv at the start of his hearing on corruption charges on December 10, 2024. MENAHEM KAHANA/Pool via REUTERS