JERUSALEM — The announcement set Israel abuzz with suspense late Monday afternoon: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a “dramatic statement” to deliver at 8 p.m., at the start of the most heavily watched news hour.

Would it be about Iran? Hezbollah? Hamas? The Trump peace plan?

The subject, it turned out, was an existential threat not to Israel, but to Mr. Netanyahu’s career.

For 20 minutes on live television — enormously valuable exposure with elections only three months away — Mr. Netanyahu railed against a corruption investigation into his dealings with several Israeli media tycoons that is widely expected to culminate soon in an indictment on bribery and other criminal charges.

The investigation was “biased,” Mr. Netanyahu complained. He demanded an opportunity to confront the state’s witnesses, on television, before any potential trial, so all Israelis “will know the whole truth.”

He scoffed at the idea that one of the main accusations against him — buying positive news coverage, in exchange for government benefits worth hundreds of millions of dollars — could amount to bribery: “A joke,” he said. “An absurdity!”

And then he suggested one of his chief rivals in the April elections, the centrist candidate Yair Lapid, was guilty of the same thing; called himself and his family victims of a “terrible witch hunt” orchestrated by the political left; and claimed that those leftist adversaries wanted him to sacrifice Israel’s security, but that he would “never do such a thing.”

At least one television channel cut away midspeech.

Others carried the full performance, which was indeed dramatic if not quite in the way Mr. Netanyahu intended. The announcement, a chorus of political rivals and analysts quickly concluded, was the drama of a hunted animal sensing that the hunters were closing off his escape routes.

“Bibi is a-f-r-a-i-d,” Ehud Barak, the former prime minister who defeated Mr. Netanyahu in 1999 and is angling for another run, wrote on Twitter.

Chemi Shalev, a columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, wrote that Mr. Netanyahu’s belief “that his procedural demand to confront states’ witnesses is worthy of a dramatic prime-time address to the nation is A. Disturbing B. A sign of his escalating hysteria.”

It was also an exploitation of his position to commandeer a prime-time audience for purely selfish political purposes, his detractors charged.

“Simply embarrassing to see,” said Itzik Shmuli, a member of Parliament from the Labor Party, who called the prime minister’s speech “a curtain of smoke meant to get the public to forget one simple fact: He is drowning in severe accusations. He is neck deep.”

From Mr. Netanyahu’s camp there was largely silence: Miri Regev, the culture minister, declared, “I believe in the prime minister’s innocence,” according to the newspaper Maariv, but hers was the loudest immediate expression of solidarity.

For months as the investigations proceeded, Mr. Netanyahu reassured his supporters with a steady and constant refrain: “There will be nothing, because there is nothing.” But his tactics belied his unperturbed pose: He attacked the press who reported the allegations, the police who investigated them, and finally the prosecutors who oversaw the cases.

Even as he has tried to project calm, he has also displayed an erratic side as the legal pressure mounted: After insisting in November that for national security reasons, Israel should wait to hold elections until the fall, Mr. Netanyahu reversed himself a month later. He called elections for April 9, in what appeared to be an attempt to notch a wide re-election margin before the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, could render his decision on an indictment.

Mr. Netanyahu then began arguing that, since he was entitled to a hearing after Mr. Mandelblit announces his decision and before an indictment is issued, and since there might not be time for that process to play out before voters go to the polls, Mr. Mandelblit owed it to the people to delay announcing his decision until after the vote.

That one did not fly: Mr. Mandelblit instead let it be known that he was speeding up his timetable accordingly.

Now, with Mr. Mandelblit reportedly only weeks away from rendering his decision, Mr. Netanyahu appears to have calculated that there will be an indictment after all — that there is, at last, something — and he has shifted tactics to try to pre-emptively discredit it by impugning the motives of those responsible.

Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition chief, David Amsalem, recently suggested that the prime minister was being framed and that “millions of people won’t accept this.”

The Ministry of Justice put out a terse statement defending the inquiry into Mr. Netanyahu after his speech on Monday, saying: “All parts of the investigation into the prime minister’s cases were conducted professionally and thoroughly.”

Nahum Barnea, a veteran columnist for Yediot Ahronot, said Mr. Netanyahu’s goal was to alarm his core political base, which has repeatedly rallied to his side over the years when he has portrayed himself as a victim, into thinking that the prosecution was nothing more than an attempted coup.

“It’s like Trump,” Mr. Barnea said, alluding to the American president’s similar claims of a witch hunt against him. “He focuses on the base and what I call the tribe: not only Likud voters but the other right-wing parties. He’s trying to put some fear into them, to get them to put their personal loyalty to him over their faith in the legal system.”

Yet to watch Mr. Netanyahu, 69, wearing a tie on Monday in exactly the same hue as the Israeli flags that flanked him, was to see someone other than the smooth, self-assured leader whose swagger has carried him through one scandal or challenge after another in his decade in office.

He looked down repeatedly at his notes, blinked frequently through what appeared to be watery eyes, and showed little of the smirking scornfulness with which he has dismissed the allegations against him in the past.

“Today, the makeup covered it up,” said Mr. Barnea, “but under the makeup, the guy sweats.”

Isabel Kershner contributed reporting.

Follow David Halbfinger on Twitter: @halbfinger.

Source: Read Full Article