“The Bibi Files,” directed by Alexis Bloom, is an extraordinary and essential documentary. It follows the corruption scandal that has engulfed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu like a toxic cloud. More than that, though, it’s about how the accusations he’s been trying to squirm out from under since 2019, when he was first indicted on charges of bribery and fraud, have changed his identity as a politician.
The film makes a powerful case that Netanyahu’s alliance with the far-right fringe of Israeli politics, which has culminated in his grotesque compulsion to prolong the massacre in Gaza with no end in sight, has been driven almost entirely by his attempt to evade the charges against him. As long as the war goes on, it becomes his excuse to stay in office. Underneath it all, the documentary argues that Netanyahu is terrified of being toppled and imprisoned, to the point that he’s willing to rip a hole in Israeli society to avoid it.
When national leaders are accused of corruption, the charges tend to be serious. Richard Nixon was brought down by a litany of crimes. Ronald Reagan oversaw the Iran-Contra scandal (a transgression that was, in my view, more serious than Watergate). Donald Trump has been charged with crimes ranging from election interference to sexual assault. So when you hear about the scandal that has consumed Netanyahu, it may, at first, seem shockingly trivial by comparison. He’s accused of bribery and fraud, the heart of the charges relating to gifts he’s received — a pattern of sponging off the “generosity” of wealthy and influential friends, tycoons who plied Bibi and his wife, Sara, with Cohiba cigars, rivers of champagne, and very expensive jewelry.
The reason this may, at first, come off as trivial is that national leaders tend to have and enjoy their perks. Many U.S. presidents, from John F. Kennedy on, have smoked Cuban cigars, and no one spends a lot of time asking where they got them from.
Yet Israel is a different sort of place. Seventy-six years after its founding, it remains a spiritually austere nation, rooted in the bare-bones socialist ethos of the kibbutz. Netanyahu’s propensity for living large sticks out, and it has only grown larger during the 17 years that he has been prime minister. For him, it’s become an issue of entitlement. He and Sara, who very much rule as a conjoined power couple (à la Bill and Hillary Clinton), travel everywhere and are treated like royalty, notably at the White House. Returning home, they want that lifestyle to continue. According to the Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker (who is one of the film’s producers), Netanyahu has sugar daddies all over the world.
In Israel, a pattern of accepting gifts like these is considered a serious infraction. Especially when it looks as though the favors may have been returned — like, for instance, the tax law that Netanyahu was accused of bending for his good buddy, the Israeli-bred Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. Far lesser scandals have brought down the careers of Israeli politicians. But as “The Bibi Files” captures, Netanyahu, in becoming the longest-serving prime minister since the founding of Israel, has developed a messianic streak. In his mind, he’s become the State (not just its representative but its embodiment). He thinks that he’s impervious, and that he’s reaping what he’s owed.
“The Bibi Files” features interviews with many important voices in Israel (politicians, journalists, the former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert), but the heart of the film is a series of digitally taped interrogations — of Netanyahu and his associates — that were leaked, surreptitiously, to the filmmakers. We see Bibi seated in his rather spartan office, with an Israeli flag on one side of his desk and a document shredder on the other, as police questioners ask him to confirm or deny details of the crimes he’s accused of. This is riveting stuff, mostly due to the fascinating performance Netanyahu gives.
His persona during the interrogations is one of calculated self-righteousness. His strategy is to deny, deny, deny, and to not remember anything. There’s a montage of him saying “I don’t remember,” which according to the film is his response to 95 percent of the questions. But it’s not merely denial. Netanyahu’s technique, and it’s formidable, is to gaslight the police interviewers by attacking them in tones of overheated self-righteousness. “That’s preposterous!” he bellows. “You’re delusional!” He is played tape recordings of witnesses detailing his transgressions, the illegal deals he has made (like when he facilitated bank loans of $250 million for the Israeli cell-phone tycoon Shaul Elovitch and, in exchange, gained editorial control of the popular youth political website Walla). And he greets each and every one of them by shouting, “Lies! All lies!” He almost convinces you that he believes it. He will sit there fuming, then slap his hand on the table, declaring his mockery of the police, of the injustice he is suffering, letting out his cry of aggrieved innocence. It’s all theater. But Netanyahu is as great an actor as Trump or maybe Al Pacino. He’s mesmerizing in his shamelessness.
By precedent, he should have resigned in 2019, when he was first brought up on charges; his own lawyer advised him to do so, and to declare his political career over. But Bibi rebelled. According to former Prime Minister Olmert, “He was challenging the system. He said, ‘No, I’m above, I’m beyond. No one can touch me.’” What happened then was that the center-left parties in the Knesset decided to ban him, and that made Netanyahu — out of the sheer need to survive — gravitate to the far right, allying himself with figures like Bezalel Smotrich, an active supporter of anti-Palestinian terrorism, and Itmar Ben-Gvit, who openly celebrated the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Joining up with jokers like these, who he refused to even be photographed with a few years before, Netanyahu formed the most far-right government in the history of Israeli politics.
And it was all to save his own skin.
When Netanyahu vows to continue the war in Gaza until every last vestige of Hamas has been rooted out and destroyed, and even those critics of his who are sympathetic to Israel say things like, “That makes no sense. It’s impossible to completely destroy Hamas,” the film forcefully suggests that Netanyahu, even as he triples down on this “militant” stance, is in some essential way lying. He knows that Hamas can’t be fully destroyed. He just wants an excuse to keep it all going. In a sense, only his corruption charges can explain the insanity of this vengeful war with no end, and the way that it has decimated Israel’s credibility around the world. Depending on how much influence you think the war in Gaza had on the U.S. presidential election (there’s no question that it lost Kamala Harris votes from Arab-Americans and from young voters around the country), you could even draw a perverse line from Bibi’s fondness for Cohiba cigars to the election of Trump.
Alexis Bloom, who made “Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg” and “Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes,” is an ace filmmaker who knows just how to pace an inquiry into the metastasization of power. She goes back and charts Netanyahu’s childhood and his life story — his older brother who both led and died in the “raid on Entebbe” (he was like the family’s Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., and Bibi launched his career on the back of his brother’s heroism), and what turned out to be Netanyahu’s astonishing skill as an Israeli spokesman. I used to see him interviewed on “Nightline,” and I would marvel at his quick-cut telegenic eloquence.
It was only a matter of time before Bibi became prime minister, but as his anti-terrorism stance hardened, he began to slash away at the pillars of Israeli democracy. By the time, a couple of years ago, that he was trying to neuter the Supreme Court, he’d thrown the entire country into disarray. There were mass protests. His impulse, by this point, was openly autocratic, and the documentary makes the crucial point that his iron fist of panic left Israel in a weakened state, which is part of how the massacre of October 7 was able to happen. The country’s guard was down.
Netanyahu is not the first ruler to use war to sustain his power. And the film suggests that he will probably end up in prison anyway. (He has now been accused of forging phone records.) “The Bibi Files” is an important documentary, because it takes in the big picture of how Benjamin Netanyahu became so entrenched that he remade Israel in his own image, in much the same way that Trump has done in the U.S. and will now try to do even more. These leaders don’t care who or what they take down with them. And in Bibi’s case, the collateral damage is starting to include not just the victims of the war in Gaza but Israel itself.
