I don’t have that much to add to what the brilliant Caroline Glick wrote about the coup in Israel. It’s much like the coup taking place in the United States. The indictment of Prime Minister Netanyahu, like the impeachment of President Trump, is a leftist farce put on by unelected officials.

At 4 in the afternoon, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit’s office announced that at 7:30 in the evening he would announce he his decision to indict Netanyahu. The underlying message was crystal clear: The day after Benny Gantz returned his mandate to form a government to President Rueven Rivlin after he failed to get a sufficient number of coalition partners to build a government, Mandelblit said that there’s no point in talking about whether or not Israel is going to new elections in March…

Voters don’t decide anything. The lawyers do. Politicians are irrelevant. The only people who count in Israel today are the unelected attorneys who run the country…

Last February, at the height of the first election campaign of the year, when Netanyahu and his right wing coalition partners were leading in all polls by a wide margin, Mandelblit took the unprecedented – and legally dubious – step of announcing his intention to indict Netanyahu of those charges – pending a pre-indictment hearing. The moment he made his announcement, the right began to slide in the polls. The Leader had spoken. And we had no right to question him. Blue and White’s scattershot campaign converged around Mandelblit’s “recommendation.” The left had a rallying cry and a reason to vote. Netanyahu’s neck was on the chopping block…

Carefully edited and wholly distorted recordings and transcripts of police interrogations of Netanyahu, his wife, son, and advisors were systematically leaked to the media. The fact that every such leak was a felony offense was of no matter. Netanyahu’s attorneys submitted request after request for Mandelblit to order an investigation of the criminal leaks. All were summarily and scornfully rejected.

The story should sound familiar. Americans are living it now.

Meanwhile the media keeps repeating the B-word, bribery, without bothering to explain the absurd details of the actual charges. (Notably, Trump is also being accused of the B-word.) 

In her talk at Restoration Weekend, Glick dug some more into the corruption and intimidation of the authorities here.

Case 2000 alleges that ahead of the 2015 elections Netanyahu had a series of conversations with the publisher of what used to be, until my paper took over, the largest circulation paper in Israel called Yedioth Ahronoth.  Yedioth Ahronoth is a very, very left-wing newspaper.  It’s a tabloid, and it’s owner, Arnon Mozes, is probably the most powerful person in Israeli media, and he’s very far to the left…

Noni Moses has been fighting a war to destroy Netanyahu for over 20 years, so Netanyahu was first elected to Prime Minister in his first term from ’96 to ’99, and, and from then on, his mission in life apparently has been to destroy Netanyahu and he’s done a lot in order to get his way.  So in 2015, Netanyahu started taping these conversations that he was having with Noni Moses and in these conversations, Noni Moses was asking him, in exchange for positive coverage, to convince Sheldon Adelson, the owner of Israel Hayom, the newspaper that I work for, to cut back on circulation of their Friday paper.  Friday is like our Sunday paper and that if Noni would do that, I mean if Adelson would do that then Noni would give Netanyahu more positive coverage ahead of the 2015 election…

So the interesting thing about Case 2000 is that at the same time, you had politicians on the left who were drafting a new legislation called the Israel Hayom Law.  Israel Hayom is a free paper, and they were drafting a law to prohibit Israel Hayom from being distributed for free and trying to force Adelson to begin charging for his newspaper, which is completely illegal in Israel because you have the right to run your business any way you want to.  It’s a free economy, and so you can’t do that, but they were trying to regulate because they wanted to force it out of business.  Forty-three members of Knesset voted for it.  All of them received positive coverage from Yedioth Ahronoth, the biggest beneficiary of this law.  The law itself was drafted by Yedioth Ahronoth’s lawyers and it was submitted to the Knesset by a Labor politician named Akan Kabal who was never seriously investigated even though the coverage of Kabal went from negative to positive as soon as he became involved in drafting the law, and finally, then Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni passed a law into the Knesset against the advice of the Attorney General who said that it was unconstitutional and she too was the recipient of fantastic coverage by Yedioth Ahronoth.  None of these people were ever investigated for receiving a bribe from Yedioth Ahronoth.

And the other thing that’s interesting about it, of course, is that until they started investigating Netanyahu, nobody ever heard of the concept that positive media coverage could be considered a bribe because in no country on the face of the planet is positive coverage considered a bribe because if positive coverage is considered a bribe, then journalism as a point of fact is a criminal enterprise, and I don’t care what you think about media this or media that, the very concept that a journalist writing positively about a politician has accepted a bribe or this is part of the quid pro quo, means that there can be no press freedom in your society because everybody has to worry that they’re going to be pulled before police investigators based upon what he or she writes. 

Most of the media has chosen to ignore the actual facts of the case. And, if you believe the media, a horrible crime took place.

But if you believe the media, well. What else is there to say?