In response to the Feb. 13 police announcement of sufficient evidence to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of bribery and breach of trust, Education Minister Naftali Bennett said, “Receiving gifts so extensively for so long does not meet the expectations of the citizenry of the State of Israel.” Polls conducted since then suggest that Bennett is wrong. According to a survey by the pollster Yossi Sarid for Reshet TV, although only 29% of Israelis surveyed believe the prime minister is innocent, more Israelis want him to stay in office than want him to resign or take time off, 49% versus 43% respectively.

An advance copy of Bennett’s speech distributed to reporters accused Netanyahu of accepting gifts from billionaires. “This is not the way to instill values in the young generation, and this is not the way we were taught,” it read. When delivering his speech, Bennett omitted this sentence. Successive Israeli governments, chief among them the current Netanyahu-Bennett government, have taught the country’s young Jewish citizenry that taking “gifts” consisting of tens of thousands of acres snatched from under destitute Palestinian shepherds and cave dwellers is nothing short of a national-religious-historical mission.

For more than 50 years — since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank — Israelis have had it drummed into them that no one would stand in the way of their state collecting more and more of these “gifts.” Neither Israeli law nor international law, neither the greatest power in the world nor Jewish morality, has prevented Jews from settling on Palestinian lands and enjoying the bounty of their natural and water resources. Even if Netanyahu manages to avoid prosecution in his “small” gifts affair — allegedly receiving benefits from businessmen — he will leave behind a legacy of the “major” gifts that he has distributed over his lengthy tenure.

Netanyahu has instilled a profound sense of entitlement in Israelis. Israel deserves to control another people because Israeli Jews are the only victims of the conflict with the Palestinians. Israelis deserve to settle in the heart of Palestinian lands because the Palestinians don’t want to make peace. Israel deserves to jail thousands of people without trial through so-called administrative detention, as it has done for decades, because their leaders want to throw Israelis into the sea. Israelis deserve to have dozens if not hundreds of nuclear bombs, according to foreign media reports, without international supervision because the Nazis annihilated 6 million Jews.