Alex Gibney is a co-producer of The Bibi Files, a new documentary directed by Alexis Bloom and available on jolt.film. In early 2023 Gibney received anonymous footage of police interrogations of Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, his wife Sara, son Yair, and high profile associates, including billionaires Arnon Milchan, [the late] Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam, personal assistants, house and security staff, and hundreds of other witnesses to the Netanyahus’ crimes. The investigation, launched in 2016, is focused on the Netanyahu’s extortion of millions of dollars worth of luxury “gifts” in exchange for political access.
Top left: “democracy” demo in Tel Aviv. Top Right: Netanyahu quoting Don Corleone. Bottom left: fighting with police interviewers. Bottom right: Legacy.
Highlighting the kind of “access” being sold, Former Finance Minister Yair Lapid recalled that Milchan was seeking the continuation of an Israeli tax exemption and Netanyahu dutifully brought up the subject with Lapid. Netanyahu also personally intervened with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to have Milchan’s U.S. visa reinstated. It must be nice to be so fabulously wealthy that heads of state volunteer for personal concierge service.
Gibney has encountered numerous hurdles trying to get the film before audiences. For starters, The Bibi Files is banned in Israel. In addition, no major streaming service wants anything to do with it and the BBC has rejected it as well.
The physical files the film is based on fell into Gibney’s hands long before the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attack and Israel’s genocidal response. Among those interviewed for the film was former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who himself went to jail for corruption. Given how routine official corruption seems to be in Israel, the story was spiced up with the thesis that Israel’s long, cruel war in Gaza is simply Netanyahu trying to stay out of jail. And that Netanyahu’s political partners, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, represent a marriage of convenience with fringe extremist elements. Without the corruption investigation, so the film’s thesis goes, there’s no need for a coalition with Kahanists. Without the Kahanists, there wouldn’t have been a protracted war in Gaza. The problem all boils down to a freak constellation of circumstances.
Well, I’m not buying it.
Top left: “Kahane chai (lives). Top right: with Ben Gvir. Bottom left: Smotrich promising annexation. Bottom right: Smotrich denying existence of Palestinians.
The simplistic, ahistorical narrative is tailor-made for Liberal Zionists who would prefer to ignore the fact that the goal of Zionism has always been to cleanse the land of Palestinians (or to use a scriptural term expropriated by religious fanatics, to “redeem the land”). Every Israeli prime minister, from Ben Gurion forward, has followed the plan. One of Netanyahu’s “liberal” predecessors, Golda Meir, famously pronounced that “there is no Palestinian people.” Sentiments like Meir’s have been heard in the Knesset since Israel’s founding.
Netanyahu’s father Benzion was a secretary to Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, author of “The Iron Wall,” a polemic that argues that Jews must treat Palestinians as mercilessly as American settlers treated Native Americans. When we meet Netanyahu’s ultra-right son Yair, the filmmakers insist he is pushing his father to the right. But darling Yairi, sitting out the war in a heavily guarded Miami condo, is simply a chip off the old block of both his father and grandfather. And Netanyahu himself is simply the latest iteration of Prime Minister to do his part to “redeem the land” from its indigenous inhabitants.
The film would have you believe that one crafty Israeli has wrapped the entire American foreign policy establishment around his little finger.
As the film winds to its end, we see Netanyahu speaking before a Joint Session of [U.S.] Congress – his 4th or 5th such appearance. The film’s point is not that he’s a habitual partner in crime with the U.S., but that Netanyahu is an especially cunning operator with a phenomenal memory who has consistently wound U.S. presidents, Congress, and Secretaries of State around his little finger.
I’m not buying this either.
The filmmakers don’t bother to point out that, without U.S. weapons, funding and diplomatic cover, Israel could never have waged its war — any of them — in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, and elsewhere. The film also misses the opportunity to remind viewers of the famous words of current President Joe Biden: “if there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent it.”
The truth is: Israel is America’s proxy, its Middle Eastern attack dog.
The 2019 film King Bibi covers much of the same bibliographic ground as The Bibi Files, but makes a convincing case that Netanyahu is a product of the American far right. After he first returned to Israel from Boston, where the well-spoken MIT man was slumming as a marketing executive for a furniture company, Netanyahu was still regarded in Israel as an “American.”
But Netanyahu had a knack for marketing “fighting terrorism” to the Americans, and above all marketing himself to Israelis. With considerable encouragement, two campaigns run by Americans, American speech and elocution classes, and a stint as ambassador in Washington, Republicans came to like the young Israeli who sounded almost like them. Netanyahu soon became as indispensable to the American foreign policy and military establishment as the little nation he would go on to lead.
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