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Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. For the new documentary, The Bibi Files, director Alexis Bloom used hundreds of hours of leaked, previously unseen interrogation footage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara, his son Yair, his staff and inner circle, in order to trace how two different stories converged, one being the corruption charges against Netanyahu, and the other, Israel's war on Gaza that has since spilled into Lebanon and elsewhere in the region.

Raviv Drucker: The engine is the corruption cases. It all started with the fact that the prime minister does not respect the law. Anyone that dares to touch Mr. Netanyahu is doomed.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, one of the main guides through the Bibi files. Since we're speaking with him, we couldn't air any interrogation tapes because On the Media can be accessed in Israel, where airing those leaked tapes without prior approval is prohibited. Since Drucker is already under investigation by the Israeli government, playing that tape in our conversation would put him in further legal jeopardy.

Alexis Bloom: Do the Netanyahus know who you are?

Brooke Gladstone: Director Alexis Bloom in the film's opening minutes.

Raviv Drucker: Netanyahu, yes, they know.

Brooke Gladstone: Drucker, now a political analyst at Israel's Channel 13, has spent decades reporting on Israeli prime ministers from Ariel Sharon to Ehud Barak to Netanyahu. Since The Bibi Files is now finally playing in select theaters in the US, this week we're re-airing our conversation from a few months back, because now you may actually have the chance to see the film. Here's Raviv Drucker.

Raviv Drucker: Netanyahu personally sued me three times in the past for libel. In all of those cases, none of them reached real testimonies in court. He never got a penny from me. Not an apology. Nothing.

Brooke Gladstone: Aha. Let's zero in a little on Netanyahu's early life. His erstwhile childhood friend, Uzi Beller, described how Bibi worshiped his older brother Yoni, the family's golden child. As the lead commando of that legendary 1976 raid to free Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda, Yoni was also the sole member of the team to die. Here's Uzi.

Uzi Beller: Yoni's death was definitely the making of Bibi. There's no question about it. It opened the door for something new to start. The first time that we hear about Benjamin Netanyahu is because of his brother. It was the kicking off of his career this tragedy. Since then, he has a lot of credit by being a very talented and gifted ambassador to the UN.

Brooke Gladstone: As Israeli's ambassador to the UN in the '80s, he enthralled listeners with his vow to protect Israel against all enemies.

Benjamin Netanyahu: In the question of terrorism, there's no neutrality. You have to choose. You're either with the terrorists or you're against them.

Raviv Drucker: He's working tirelessly on how to perform in front of the TV, what to do with your hands, where to look, sound bites. He became masterful in the art of TV.

Brooke Gladstone: You think it was partly those rhetorical skills that propelled his career from ambassador to chair of the right-wing Likud party to prime minister at the unprecedented age of 47 back in 1996?

Raviv Drucker: Yes, he's brilliant. He has this iron will. It doesn't matter how much he is getting hurt politically from this story or this action. It's no coincidence that he is the long-serving prime minister of Israel, ever.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. You reported on several Israeli prime ministers, but at some point, you started to realize that the corruption of Netanyahu was different.

Raviv Drucker: Because his obsession with the media, it's something that we never experienced.

Brooke Gladstone: The extent of the corruption, the value of the gifts he received was pretty notable. One of the big cases covered in the documentary explores his involvement with an Israeli Hollywood mogul named Arnon Milchan, who became a billionaire producing massive Hollywood hits like Fight Club and Pretty Woman, 12 Years a Slave, he has two Oscars, but throughout Milchan's years in America, he kept strong ties to Israel. As you say in the film, everybody knows that if you want to speak with the prime minister, go to Arnon. So, what is important for us to know about that relationship?

Raviv Drucker: For Arnon Milchan, it's so important to be close to the prime minister, any prime minister. He was close to Ehud Barak, to Ehud Olmert, to Shimon Peres. It's very important for him to be someone who is whispering in their ears. He's a Hollywood mogul, but he wants to be also involved in the Iranian-Israeli conflict or the government affairs in Israel. This is like entertainment to him. When it was Netanyahu, the price for him to pay was to become like his sugar daddy.

Brooke Gladstone: A prime witness in the interrogations is Hadas Klein, who was Milchan's former assistant. She exposed the gifts to Bibi and his wife Sara. Cigars and champagne worth thousands of dollars a case, a bracelet encrusted with scores of diamonds worth $42,000. She also testified that these gifts were solicited by the Netanyahus and more or less mandatory. The prime minister, he has a famous memory, but it seems to fail him again and again in response to the police interrogation. He can't recall the cases of champagne in the car, in the house, and those beloved cigars or even that blindingly blingy bracelet. He's stonewalling, right?

Raviv Drucker: Yes, absolutely. The number of questions that he really answers through this very, very long interrogation are very few. Most of the time, he's saying, anything that I received is from a friend. It has nothing to do with the fact that I'm the prime minister. He usually said, I don't remember. I can't recall. You know that I'm busy with Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah in the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned Sara Netanyahu. She's Bibi's third and current wife, recipient of a lot of Milchan's gifts, especially the champagne and the bling. The clips of her police interrogation are kind of terrifying. They're even more thunderingly outraged than her husband's. You observed that they're almost like a couple that runs the country. I mean, are we talking about like Juan and Eva Peron in Argentina? What's her role in the government?

Raviv Drucker: She has a lot of influence over Mr. Netanyahu's decision. People in Israel already know that. Only now, when Netanyahu joined a new minister to his coalition, all the headlines in Israel were, the new minister will join only if Sara Netanyahu will not object. Those were the headlines.

Brooke Gladstone: Now to 2015, when Netanyahu wins his bid for reelection by a landslide, despite polls that predicted a dead heat. In the film, Nir Hefetz, Netanyahu's former media advisor said that--

Nir Hefetz: This night was not only his biggest win, it was also the day that he started to deteriorate.

Raviv Drucker: 2015 is a landmark because until then, he always wanted to save some eye contact with the other camp, to be against them, against the elites, against the left wing, but not too much against them. In 2015, he said, "Even though I was soft on them, they were all against me. And even though they were all against me, I won." It makes him very vain, very right-wing. Then the interrogation came up in 2016. Since then, we have a different Benjamin Netanyahu.

Brooke Gladstone: The next big investigation after Milchan, centers around Netanyahu and an Israeli media tycoon, Shaul Elovitch, who made a fortune importing Nokia cell phones but found himself suffocating under a mountain of debt after taking out millions in bank loans, and in 2016, he panicked, reached out to Netanyahu. You referred to this earlier, Bibi's obsession with the media. He seized the opportunity to take over a news outlet called Walla. This was not exactly an important news outlet for the tycoon, but it mattered a lot to Netanyahu.

Raviv Drucker: When you look at this period, he did a couple of things to at least four or five media outlets, trying to control them or soften the coverage or to get his people to be inside those media outlets. From all of those activities, two media outlets became a criminal case. One is called Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest newspaper in Israel. The second one is this website.

Brooke Gladstone: Walla.

Raviv Drucker: The thesis of this indictment is saying, look, this is a quid pro quo deal. Netanyahu is giving this tycoon all kinds of regulation that the government can give that will help him to finance his debt. In return, this website will actually surrender its control. They will not appoint an editor or political reporter without consulting with Netanyahus and getting their approval. They will put the stories in or take stories out because of Netanyahu's demands.

Brooke Gladstone: In November 2019, Netanyahu was officially indicted for breach of trust, accepting brides, and fraud. We know that since 2016, he didn't have any friends on the left or the center, but in 2019, he was regarded as more or less illegitimate in the view of the center and the left parties in Israel. At that point, it seems he either had to resign or he had to turn to the far right to create a coalition, which is where Itamar Ben Gvir, now minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister now enter the story. These are two people so marginalized, you said, he wouldn't dare to appear in a photo op with them a few years ago, but now they're part of his cabinet. Give us a brief overview of these two men.

Raviv Drucker: Well, they are ultra, ultra right wing.

Brooke Gladstone: And what does that mean?

Raviv Drucker: It means, for example, that both of them now want to resettle in Gaza Strip, which means to bring Jews to the Gaza Strip, inhabited by 2.5 million Palestinians. They want to have settlements in South Lebanon, or at least military presence. They want to have all the West Bank, the Judea, and Samaria as part of Israel. Both of them regards Arabs as somewhat inferior to Jews. Those politicians never had enough votes to reach the Parliament, and now he is such an important minister because of those corruption cases that led Netanyahu to join him.

Now, when you speak about the cabinet meeting, thinking about how to retaliate to the Iran attack that might inflame a regional war in all the Middle East, maybe in all the world, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich sitting in such a crucial cabinet meeting, I cannot overdramatize the influence that those corruption cases and the trial had on Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: There's a lot of argument in the American left over whether the Israeli government is actually attempting genocide. If you go to the rhetoric of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, you see genocidal statements in there all the time.

Raviv Drucker: When you hear this public statement saying things like wiping out Gaza or transfer all these people to some other countries, of course, I can understand the listeners that says, oh, well, this is a genocide intention by those two.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, so zoom out for a moment. You conclude, and you are by no means alone here, that Netanyahu is so desperate to stay out of prison that he's willing to escalate violence in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Iran, all to appease the extremist wing of his governing coalition. Is that how we should understand the wider war around Israel?

Raviv Drucker: I don't want to put it all on his desire to stay out of prison. I want to put it on his desire to stay in power. Some of his crucial decision in this war is being influenced only by political reasons. Otherwise, he would have done a deal to free the hostages a few months ago, and part of this deal is a ceasefire, at least in Gaza. He is doing everything in his power just to stay in office, even though it has such an enormous cost.

Brooke Gladstone: You've talked about Bibi's interference in journalism or his effort to shake it to his liking. What do you think about the overall health of the Israeli media at this moment?

Raviv Drucker: I would say that most of the mainstream media, 90% of it, it's very, very critical on the prime ministers. At the same time, he was able with relentless efforts to have some islands in the Israeli media functioning as his soldiers. The most important one is TV Channel 14, which is Netanyahu's channel. They reach a lot of viewers. He has one radio station, and in other news outlet, he has this guy and this guy and this guy. If you watch only those channels, you will experience a totally different world that I'm experiencing. It's a little bit like MSNBC and Fox.

Brooke Gladstone: There are so many polls. Do you know what the public feels about Netanyahu these days?

Raviv Drucker: I'm sure 100% that he's not popular at all, and he knows it as well. This is why he's doing everything in his power to stay in office right now because he knows that if there will be an election, he will be out.

Brooke Gladstone: Are you worried about your future as a reporter in Israel?

Raviv Drucker: It's 13 years that I'm worried, and after a while, it becomes part of your life so you're less worried. Not because the threat is smaller, because you're getting used to anything.

Brooke Gladstone: Why did you want to be part of the The Bibi Files even while knowing it was going to bring you under greater scrutiny by the Israeli government?

Raviv Drucker: The scrutiny by the Israeli government doesn't worry me at all. I think it's very important movie, so the international audience also will know more about Mr. Netanyahu, about Israel, and about the 7th of October war.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much.

Raviv Drucker: Thank you so much for having me.

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Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Tune in to the big show this weekend to hear about how AI is changing music-making and music criticism in the era of Spotify Wrapped.

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