Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) tweeted a nine minute critique of the indictment in the “security affair” Saturday night.
It was the prime minister’s first statement in defense of his spokesman, Eli Feldstein, who has been charged with disclosing classified intelligence with the intent of harming the security of the state.
“I, my colleagues in government, and my staff are working around the clock to lead Israel to victory on the seven fronts of this war… But at the same time we are dealing with an endless stream of criminal leaks from within the State of Israel, a deluge of serious leaks.”
He enumerated a series of leaks, which he claimed “came out of the limited war cabinet, out of the hostage-release negotiation team, out of the most sensitive and restricted security forums of the State of Israel. These leaks give information of inestimable value to our enemies, to Iran, to Hezbollah, to Hamas.”
Netanyahu proceeded to list several recent leaks that have impacted Israel’s security and wartime strategies but led to no investigations.
“In all these cases no one was arrested, no one was questioned,” he said. “It does not take a genius to understand why there was no investigation into all these leaks.”
“And then, suddenly,” he added. “A new investigation into a single leak erupted into our lives. A leak of a document that exposes Hamas’s strategy to divide Israeli society. This document should have been on my desk, I should have been making decisions based on this material, and I certainly should not have been excluded from it. And this is not the first time that I have been denied vital information. But only here, and precisely here, did investigators suddenly appear.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu directly addressed the charges against Eli Feldstein and another IDF reserve officer and said that “the charges have been filed against them, but their target is clear – to hurt me. This hunting machine will not deter me. I want to say a word of comfort to the Feldstein and the reserve officer families. It hurts me that they are using your sons as pawns to hurt me. The allegation that any of them acted deliberately to harm the security of the State of Israel is a malicious claim, a preposterous assertion.”
“I know Eli Feldstein, he is a patriotic Israeli, a passionate Zionist, a reserve captain who made his way from the world of Torah to the army. There is no way in the world that he would have done anything deliberate to compromise the security of the state, but what’s to be done if you are approached by masked men in the dead of night, they put you in detention, they isolate you, they handcuff you, they threaten you with life imprisonment if you don’t give them what they want? A man can break, he can confess to murdering Arlosoroff.”
“We know the drill. Then, then there’s a trial, everything fades, and the truth comes out. In the meantime there are accusations, there are headlines. I’ve read the indictment. And it’s clear to me that the reservist thought that relevant documents weren’t reaching me. And that’s a very serious matter. I am the prime minister, I need to receive important secret documents.”
Netanyahu expressed shock at the reports of “young people who are held like the worst of terrorists,” saying that the accused are “spending long days being denied access to a lawyer and having their basic rights as citizens violated.”
The prime minister was correct to address the Israeli public directly via social media. Most local media outlets are as committed as Israel’s security establishment to toppling Netanyahu’s government.
What is still unclear, however, is what role the United States has been playing in all this.
Could the outgoing Biden administration be spitefully trying to hurt Netanyahu on its way out?
Or could the incoming Trump administration be attempting to take down the Israeli prime minister who thwarted Trump’s two-state agenda last time around before he assumes power in January?
Either way, the Israeli security establishment’s overdependent closeness to Washington has created significant daylight between it and Netanyahu that has made conducting this current war far more complicated than it should be.
Because these contradictions would be antagonized by any prime minister who would prioritize Israel’s national interest ahead of the US empire’s designs on West Asia, the solution cannot be to oust Netanyahu but rather to erect firm boundaries between the Israeli security apparatus and the Americans.
