At War With Virtually Everybody

Is Netanyahu finally getting caught?

Eli Feldstein, former spokesman in the Prime Minister's Office, now under indictment in an elaborate plot to use fabricated intelligence to exculpate Binyamin Netanyahu (who of course knows nothing about it) in the deaths of those six hostages. Photos via The Times of Israel.

I don't pretend to know any better than I did before the election what Joe Biden should have done about the Gaza war beyond what he did do, but I will say that the administration shouldn't send a ferocious letter like the one of October 16 if they're just going to back off from their threats the way they did on November 12 and pretend everything's fine, the way they've generally seemed to do for the whole 13 months. You can't have it both ways.

International Criminal Court has finally issued the arrest warrants the prosecutor requested last May for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, former Defense Minister Gallant, and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif (whom Israel claims to have killed in a missile attack back in July, but they've never offered any kind of evidence). White House and State Department quickly out condemning "moral equivalence", which I don't get. The ICC isn't claiming that Netanyahu and Deif are "morally equivalent", merely that they have something in common—both seem to be guilty of war crimes. And not the same crimes. Deif is held  responsible for the killing of some 1200 Israelis and others in the massacres of October 7, Netanyahu and Gallant for the killing of at least 44,000 Palestinians, a large majority of them noncombatant women and children, and the deliberate starving and displacement of two million more, for one thing, and Deif committed his crime first, so he "started it", so that Israel is entitled to argue that it has merely been exercising its "right to defend itself" (needless to say, Gazans are not allowed to argue that they were driven stir-crazy by their 16 years in a kind of prison camp from which their freedom of movement was under absolute Israeli and Egyptian control, stir-craziness isn't a legitimate defense).

BBC News Hour asked a Prime Minister's Office flunky "what evidence do you have" of some complaint the flunky was making, I didn't quite catch what, but I think it must have been Israel's irrelevant allegations against prosecutor Karim Khan:

the PMO said it rejected “with disgust” the court’s “false” and “absurd” charges — and asserted that they stem from Khan’s efforts to “save his skin from the serious charges against him for sexual harassment” as well as the beliefs of “biased judges motivated by antisemitic hatred of Israel.”

but the flunky didn't offer evidence; he leapt or Gish-galloped to a jurisdictional quibble, that the Palestinian state, the ICC member on behalf of which the charges were being made, doesn't exist and is therefore not entitled to relief, which is pretty cheap, since it is Israel's strenuous efforts that prevent it from existing in official reality, as opposed to the physical reality of its 5.5 million otherwise stateless people in the occupied territories, not to mention many millions more in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere (Palestine is recognized as a sovereign state by 75% of the UN General Assembly membership, and the only thing that holds it back from a voting membership is Israel's big friend in the Security Council, the United States). 

He also didn't offer evidence that Netanyahu or Gallant is innocent of the charges (or that Deif is really dead). When the facts aren't on your side, argue the law, and when the law isn't on your side, then whatabout the other side's lawyer.

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Meanwhile, a new and really shocking series of stories about Netanyahu has been emerging largely unseen in the US, in the shadows cast by the US election and the naming of Trump's clown cabinet (Christian nationalist Mike Huckabee is to be ambassador to Jerusalem, I guess he wanted front row seats for the Second Coming and the tossing of unbaptized Jews into the Lake of Fire).

I’ll start in the middle of the story, with the murdered hostages.

After IDF discovered the bodies of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Master Sgt. Ori Danino, murdered a couple of days earlier in a tunnel beneath Rafah, on September 1, it was noted that the first three were on the list of the first batch of hostages who would be released, on "humanitarian" grounds, in the ceasefire plan Hamas and Israel had agreed to in July, so that if Prime Minister Netanyahu hadn't kept delaying the ceasefire with one new objection after another for two months, at least those three might have been alive, and free.

But shortly afterwards, on September 6, the German tabloid Bild ran a remarkable story suggesting that Netanyahu was not to blame: they'd somehow obtained a document, said to be from Yahya Sinwar's own computer, detailing his strategies in the ceasefire negotiations, which (in the words of the pro-Israel lobby group Foundation for Defense of Democracies, published in Washington the same day)

includes manipulating international opinion against Israel by asserting that Israel is responsible for rejecting the U.S.-proposed ceasefire deal and that negotiations are failing because of “Israel’s stubbornness.” Meanwhile, the group believes that deliberately dragging on negotiations would “exhaust” Israel’s military and increase international pressure on the Jewish state. The document stated, “Important clauses in the agreement should be improved, even if negotiations continue over a long period of time.” 

This was pleasing for Netanyahu, who took right away to quoting the Bild story as not only demonstrating that the ceasefire delays were not his fault but also that anybody who blamed him for that was part of a Hamas conspiracy. 

But the story was also extremely disturbing to Israeli intelligence, in the first place because the Sinwar document came from them: it had been leaked to Bild and to London's Jewish Chronicle without permission, and it was strictly classified; letting it out was letting out too much information on the access Israel had to Hamas communications, and could endanger sources and methods, and they quickly set up an investigation to find out who had done it.

Then there was another thing that Israeli intelligence didn't necessarily want to discuss: that while most of the documents were authentic, at least one was entirely fabricated, and the published stories had some false information, as Richard Silverstein reported at the Tikun Olam blog in early November (quoting himself in the second and fourth paragraphs):

It claimed Hamas intended to spirit hostages out of Gaza to Iran by way of the Philadelphi corridor:

In the second document – the Jewish Chronicle claimed Sinwar was planning to transfer the abductees via Philadelphia to Sinai and from there to Tehran or Yemen. It was never in the hands of the Chronicle, or the IDF, or the “poison machine” (referring to Bibi’s propaganda machine and its influence operations), or anyone at all.  Nor is there any validity to the claim that there ever was such a document.

Other material, which was attributed to Hamas’ leader, Yahya Sinwar, had nothing to do with him.  The German publication, Bild, ran a headline saying documents leaked to them...were written by Sinwar himself.  It claimed that Sinwar wrote that Hamas didn’t want a ceasefire and intended to hold out as long as possible against one:

Bild and numerous other media outlets claimed that it was Sinwar’s document. In reality, it was the opinion of an intermediate Hamas intelligence official, in response to the latest draft outline for a hostage deal, a ceasefire and the end of the war.  This was another lie.

By the beginning of November, the investigation had identified the leaker right at the heart of the Prime Minister's Office: Eli Feldstein, a young man with ties to the West Bank settler community who had been hired as a security adviser and spokesman four days after last year's October 7 attack, even though he had failed lie detector tests and his security background check (Netanyahu, like Trump, doesn't mind giving jobs to people who fail security checks), had gotten the documents from a confederate in Shin Bet. 

Charged with transferring classified information with intent to harm the state, illicit possession of classified information, and obstruction of justice, Feldstein in now in detention, complaining through his lawyer that everything he has done has been on behalf of the prime minister, who has abandoned him. Netanyahu has not been charged with anything in the case, though he's obviously the one who was meant to benefit from this effort to manufacture evidence making it look as if it's other people, not him, who have all the responsibility for the prolonging of the war and the deaths in particular of Hersh, Carmel, and Eden.

That's not the only case, either, in which evidence to exculpate Netanyahu has been fabricated. There's also the question from the very beginning of the war of what he knew about the Hamas breakout as it happened, and when he knew it: before the raids began, dozens of Hamas personnel activated SIM cards, in what could have been interpreted as a sign of the oncoming raid, and Netanyahu has claimed he wasn't informed, but now it seems that he was informed, and the Prime Minister's Office has been doctoring the protocols in order to hide the fact:

The report says Col. “Shin,” an IDF officer at the PMO identified only by his initial, received an update hours before the attack about Hamas units in both northern and southern Gaza activating SIM cards. It says investigators suspect the colonel was later blackmailed by a top official — who supposedly possessed a “sensitive” video of the officer — to later change protocols related to the SIM cards.

Separately, according to Ynet, months after October 7, Avi Gil, who was Netanyahu’s military secretary at the time, was surprised to find during a review of transcripts and logs from that night that key details had been altered

(It seems that the sensitive video reveals the colonel's "inappropriate" though not abusive relationship with a female PMO staffer.)

He has also been under criminal investigation of his own for altering transcripts of his meetings in the management of the war:

Reports in Hebrew media indicated that the probe is linked to reported allegations earlier in the year that Netanyahu had been attempting to keep his conversations regarding the management of the war in Gaza untraceable.... senior figures in the security establishment feared that efforts were being made to edit the minutes of wartime discussions held with Netanyahu after discovering discrepancies between transcripts of the meetings and what the figures had heard in real-time.

At least some of this material is said to be about the same issue, the IDF failure on October 7 to realize what was happening, and Netanyahu's claims to have not been informed, but it's also been alleged that some of it has to do with evidence for the International Criminal Court case against him:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being investigated on suspicion of secretly making changes to the minutes of a meeting that dealt with the “preparation for proceedings against Israel in The Hague,” Yedioth Ahronoth reported on 8 November.

Earlier this week, the Israeli media reported the police were investigating the prime minister for “criminal incidents” in which he edited the transcripts of his cabinet meetings during the early days of the war on Gaza that began on 7 October last year.

Reports emerged in the Israeli media earlier this year that Netanyahu faced allegations of trying to make his “conversations regarding the management of the war in Gaza untraceable.”

He seems to be at war with virtually everybody: not just Iran and Lebanon and his former allies in Hamas and their enemies in the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations, but also Joe Biden, as I've tried to show, and his own military, and the Israeli judiciary. Will somebody arrest him, please?