To answer the question of how an important, legitimate and necessary investigative piece by a respected veteran journalist could be turned by the prime minister into a radical left media conspiracy to unseat him, we must look back to the night of his landslide victory in the last election on March 17, 2015.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it was not only a political victory over his rival on the left — leader of the Zionist Camp, Isaac Herzog — but also a victory over the “left-wing media.” Even during the election campaign, Netanyahu argued on social media that the publisher of Yedioth Ahronoth, Noni Mozes, is working against him and to elect Herzog by means of “ridiculous, false and provocative smears against me and against my wife as part of a media campaign to replace the Likud government with a left-wing government.” For the first time in Israel, the prime minister led a personal delegitimization campaign against the owner of a leading paper and hitched this fight to his election campaign.

Indeed, judging by the results, this strategy has succeeded beyond all expectations. Netanyahu has convinced Likud members that he’s persecuted and that the media is an arm of the left. He left out the fact, naturally, that he himself controls the most widely distributed paper in Israel, Yisrael Hayom, through his associate and the paper’s owner, Sheldon Adelson, and that he uses it to disseminate messages and attack Mozes and Yedioth Ahronoth. This attack signaled an escalation in the complicated relationship between Netanyahu and the Israeli media. 

The way Netanyahu has experienced things, he won the last election despite the media persecuting him, and he did it on his own, with his own two hands — even when Likud leaders were convinced he was about to fall and even started to fight over his inheritance. On that election night, a (new) Netanyahu was born who believes there’s no one else, that his power is virtually unlimited and that he can and must work alone — a Netanyahu who not only sees the media as an enemy that seeks to defeat him but also uses it politically and cynically.