A scene that was once deemed impossible was captured on film May 24. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chaired a Cabinet meeting in the morning and appeared in court before three judges in the afternoon. The omnipotent leader of Israel already broke Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s record by governing for 11 consecutive years — and 14 years in total. Now, however, he was standing trial on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of public trust. From that moment onward, Israel was facing an unprecedented situation: The state itself was pressing charges against the man who leads it.

There can be no doubt that the only person who could generate such a scenario without blinking an eye is Netanyahu himself. As of now, this image will be part of his historic legacy, overshadowing all his other activities and achievements. In the upcoming year and a half, before he is slated to hand his position over to Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Netanyahu will make the most concerted effort of his life to overturn this legacy and create one that is far more distinguished. He wants to enter the history books, not prison.

Netanyahu keeps raising the ante almost daily. Anyone who thought that once he appears before the court he would lower his head, if only for show, and follow the rules of the game was proved wrong — and in a big way. Netanyahu showed up on the steps of the Jerusalem District Court around 2 p.m. local time, an hour before the trial was supposed to start. This in itself was unusual for him. And he showed up with a contingent of people eager to defend him. He was surrounded by Likud ministers and Knesset members and others close to him, all of them hiding behind surgical masks. They showed up to declare, “We are on trial too.”

Still, Netanyahu did all the talking. He gave a long, bellicose speech, lashing out with the harshest accusations at each stage of the investigation against him. He attacked everyone from the police to the state prosecution office, to Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit. With great elegance, he ignored the fact that he himself had appointed most of his investigators, the police chief and attorney general, among others, to their posts — people considered close to him, both politically and ideologically. Instead, Netanyahu wove a fantastical conspiracy theory, in which an “invisible hand” turned the entire Israeli law enforcement system into a mechanism in the service of darkness, operated remotely, with a single mission: to remove Netanyahu from office.