It is difficult to assess the mood of the Israeli public after police on Tuesday announced their recommendations in the corruption cases against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is mainly because a majority of the TV channels are controlled by a biased media that in large part serves as a platform for its own positions. Anyone who witnessed the desperate attempts by police to broadcast their recommendations at 7:59 p.m., before notifying those under investigation, understood the extent of the collaboration between the police and the media. Ever since the investigations into Netanyahu began, the media has shown what amounts to nothing less than unprecedented love for senior police officials in a democratic country.
We will learn the public's positions on the matter come election time. The recommendations will likely not impact the results of the election. For 25 years, the Left has been incapable of either creating a vision or producing a leadership that could serve as a viable alternative to the Right. Members of the old elite who vote for Yesh Atid and the Zionist Union know the Jewish State must not be left in the hands of amateurs.
From the outset of the investigations, it was clear that the media, at the service of the political fringes, saw them as a means to bring down the government. The coalition of the Left and the media never forgave Netanyahu for his central role in proving the foolhardiness of the 1994 Oslo Accords. Fake peace broke out with the fake news to carry out a government coup. The citizens who followed the defamation, the leaks and the fiery headlines against Netanyahu and his family identified the ultimate goal with precision.
Many citizens felt the police recommendations were nothing more than an act of vengeance. That much was made clear when, in an interview on the day when the investigation was supposed to conclude, Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh said he had known the results of the investigation for a year.
While there is disappointment in the fact that Netanyahu accepted gifts, to my mind it is the extreme recommendations in the case that have bolstered the public's impression that the police have become an emissary of former Prime Minister's Residence custodian Meni Naftali and Labor political strategist Eldad Yaniv, the main organizers of a weekly protest against Netanyahu. To this, we must add the fact that Yair Lapid, the former finance minister who would like to be Israel's prime minister, served as a type of state witness in the case. Witnesses whose interests are only too well-known will always raise doubts as to their credibility.
It is under these circumstances that Israel's citizens will patiently wait for the conclusion of legal proceedings to formulate a final opinion. In the meantime, they will need to endure the endless campaign of hypocrisy by the media, which instead of serving as democracy's watchdog, has begun to bite into the most basic of democratic values.
