The Bibi Files: A liberal Zionist effort to blame Netanyahu for Israel's woes

Throughout much of 2023, nationwide rallies gripped Israel as protesters demanded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abandon plans to overhaul the country's judicial system.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis called his attempt to place the courts under parliamentary jurisdiction a "judicial coup", designed to grant him immunity from several charges of corruption levelled at him dating back to 2016.

But then, on 7 October 2023, when Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel over Israeli restrictions and provocations at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the protests stopped and instead the overwhelming majority of Israelis began demanding retribution and revenge.

Israel, which has imposed a debilitating siege on Gaza since 2007, cut all electricity supplies to the enclave and blocked crucial food and medicine deliveries, while fighter jets deliberately bombed schools, hospitals and refugee camps - killing thousands of people.

Netanyahu had riled up Israeli society, not merely to avenge 7 October, but to save his decaying premiership. 

This is one of the main arguments in The Bibi Files, a new documentary that examines how Netanyahu dragged Israel through the grinder - as a means to escape a torrent of corruption charges, or as a natural consequence of being a sociopathic power-hungry lunatic.

But as far as material facts go, Netanyahu faces separate charges of fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes in a case that, if convicted, could land the 75-year-old in jail for the rest of his days.

The film, based on an explosive set of leaked tapes of police interrogations with Netanyahu, his wife Sara, his son Yair, and hundreds of business associates and former family staffers, narrates a story of an entitled family who consider themselves beholden to no one - besides their billionaire benefactors - as they march towards despotism.

"When you do something wrong and you get away with it, once, and twice, and three times, and 10 times and 20 times," investigative journalist Raviv Drucker, who is also one of the co-producers of The Bibi Files, says of Netanyahu in the film.

"You begin to think that you are immune; that nothing will touch you," he adds.

An obstinate Netanyahu

The film opens with Netanyahu pouring sparkling water into a glass in a sparse office as two police officers prepare to start their interrogation.

He appears somewhat self-assured, but the constant fidgeting betrays his composure. The paper shredder set up to his immediate left doesn't help.

And it's not long before he berates the police for wasting his time in what would become a routine effort to derail their line of questioning focussed on a history of receiving gifts from billionaires on a quid-pro-quo basis.

For instance, in one case, Netanyahu is said to have helped secure a US visa for Arnon Milchan, an, Israeli Hollywood film producer, in exchange for gifts.

In another case, Netanyahu allegedly provided regulatory favours to the owner of the Israeli telecommunications company Bezeq in return for positive coverage of him and his family on the news site Walla. 

"You are asking me delusional questions," Netanyahu tells the police. "That's preposterous!" he thunders in another effort.

For close to everything else, he feigns ignorance or forgetfulness. "I don't remember," he says repeatedly.

The tapes - comprising more than a 1,000 hours of footage - were leaked 0ver the Signal app to the award-winning American documentary film-maker Alex Gibney, who then recruited South African documentary film-maker Alexis Bloom and the investigative journalist Drucker to help produce the film.

The rushes show the conversations between the police and Netanyahu and, separately, his family and their associates.

These include footage of interviews between the police and the late pro-Israeli American billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam.

These interrogations are interspersed with interviews with journalists, and former politicians and other associates who respond or provide context to the leaked tapes.

Expert manipulator

For those familiar with Netanyahu's theatrics, his obfuscations and denials and counter-claims aren't especially novel.

The prime minister's obsession with cultivating his public image, and his skill as as expert political communicator and manipulator is well known; this is the Netanyahu method.

But the film digs a little deeper into his background. 

It showcases his long ties and knowledge of the US, having studied and worked in the country for years prior to becoming the prime minister. 

It demonstrates, too, how he has, as the longest serving premier in Israeli history, used the spectre of "terrorism", of "being besieged", and "under attack", as means to build and sustain his career.

In fact, insecurity and instability have been the lynchpins for his policies and the bedrock of his international diplomacy.

"He survives in a state of war. He survives in a state of instability," Drucker, the investigative journalist says.

'He survives in a state of war. He survives in a state of instability'

- Raviv Drucker, investigative journalist

Even, then, it is the performance of Sara and Yair, his wife and son, that most illustrate the delusional bearings of a family determined to turn the prime ministership into a dynasty.

While Yair seems to hold onto delusions of grandeur, Sara is depicted as argumentative and unhinged.

She berates the police for daring to question the behaviour of her husband. Witnesses narrate her continuous demand for expensive gifts, including necklaces and rings.

Like the prime minister, the family use the Palestinians as a bogeyman to obfuscate from their crimes.

"This is what the Israeli police are doing? When there are 100,00 illegal Arab homes. It is unbelievable," Yair Netanyahu says to the police in one scene.

Exceptionalising Netanyahu

From the onset of Israel's bombardment in Gaza post 7 October, Palestinians have routinely said that the Israeli offensive wasn't focused on retrieving the captives held by Hamas.

As of 29 December 2024, 117 hostages had been returned alive to Israel, with 105 released in a prisoner exchange deal, four released by Hamas unilaterally and just eight rescued by the Israeli army.

Palestinians have maintained the the assault was aimed at levelling Gaza and exterminating the population.

Months into the genocide, as thousands of children were killed and hospitals and schools levelled, Israeli families also began to resent the prime minister's response.

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The film acknowledges the carnage in Gaza, too, as grossly counterproductive to the retrieval of Israeli hostages.

Instead it argues that the Israeli approach to Gaza was driven in part by the whims of Netanyahu's far right-wing coalition partners, such as Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, without whom the prime minister could not have remained in power in 2022.

Like many other Israelis, both Ben Gvir and Smotrich seek the annexation of the occupied West Bank and the expansion of Israel into Gaza and southern Lebanon.

The argument goes that by partnering with these personalities, Netanyahu brought these fascist ideals to the heart of the state.

Whereas it is fairly obvious that Netanyahu used the 7 October attack as a means to reinvent himself as the country's saviour, this approach in the documentary proves grossly insufficient as a plot line. 

Not only does it exceptionalise Netanyahu as a rogue agent who has seemingly captured the state and the judiciary and committed heinous crimes in Gaza for his own sake, it seeks to falsely characterise Israel as a functional democracy before he came along. 

As Palestinians and several human rights groups have attested, Israel is an apartheid state where there are different laws for Jews and Palestinians.

Trivialising Israeli crimes

The singular focus on the Netanyahu's as uniquely heinous - while mildly amusing - does little to explain the rot that lies at the heart of the state. 

In fact, the corruption charges are categorically minute in nature compared to the genocide he is currently leading and it's rather apt that the Israeli police (and the film-makers) think that unauthorised cigars, champagne and bracelets is what will alter people's opinion about a man wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity. 

It is also telling that the film is able to discuss recent developments in Israel's war on Gaza, but makes no mention of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)'s ruling that describes Gaza as the site of a plausible genocide. 

In so doing, the film-makers use Israel's horrific operations in Gaza as little more than a crutch to help indict Netanyahu for dragging Israel towards the abyss.

The film-makers use Israel's horrific operations in Gaza as little more than a crutch to help indict Netanyahu for dragging Israel towards the abyss

The film-makers themselves have said that The Bibi Files is not a critique of Israel; even further clarifying the film was made for those in the centre.

In other words, while the film may count as a crucial contribution to the unveiling of Netanyahu to his Israeli western, and even Indian followers, The Bibi Files is little more than an attempt to redeem the Israeli state itself.

It trivialises Israel's crimes as a settler-colonial state that was predicated on the elimination and the displacement of the indigenous people - Palestinians - even before Netanyahu was born. It says nothing about how Israel systematically contravenes international law, or shirks its responsibilities to hold itself responsible for the crimes against Palestinians. 

And even if it is true that under Netanyahu's watch, settler attacks against Palestinians over the past few years have risen, and the genocide in Gaza will rank as among the worst episodes this century, Israel is the culmination of a society and polity that continues to lean on such brutality against the Palestinians as necessary and inevitable, no matter who is in charge. 

It isn't able to explain - if this is a Netanyahu problem - how Israeli soldiers have carried out massacre after massacre of children in hospitals and refugee camps and apartment blocks.

The closest the film gets to hinting at apartheid is when Ami Ayolon, the former head of Israeli intelligence, says that Smotrich was never put in jail, despite being linked to attempting to blow up a bridge in Israel, because Israel treats "Jewish terrorists" and "Palestinian terrorists" differently.   

A captivating examination into the making of the Netanyahu family as eager despots in the making, the film might be, but its inability to locate Netanyahu within the context of a racist, supremacist and genocidal state leaves the project severely without a sting.

For when the rest of the world is calling for him to tried at the ICC for crimes against humanity, what does it portend to be all bothered about this story about illicit cigars and champagne?

The Bibi Files is streaming on the online platform Jolt until 16 March 2025.