Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting from doorway to doorway, refusing to cede a single stronghold. He and his defense team are conducting a determined war of attrition in order to play for time, score points and continue battering and exhausting the prosecutors in the hopes that something will give — the indictment will collapse, the judges will accept the defense arguments.
On Feb. 8, Netanyahu and his legal team arrived to the Jerusalem District Court for the last pre-trial hearing. Netanyahu pleaded not guilty. After that, the court was set to schedule the beginning of the evidentiary stage. Then, Netanyahu’s lawyers asked for the next session to be postponed for after the March 23 elections. Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman, who presides over the three judge panel in Netanyahu’s trial, was unhappy with the request. “In essence, you [Netanyahu’s defense team] are asking to defer the evidentiary stage by six months. We should have heard evidence long ago. Why are we seeking to press on, you ask? Because it’s been a year since the indictment was filed,” she noted.
The trial had begun on May 24, 2020. Following various pre-trial motions and procedural delays, it resumed only on Feb. 8. This was to be the final stage before the main act: The evidentiary stage in this fateful legal drama when prosecution witnesses are scheduled to take the stand one by one to testify against him. As expected, Netanyahu denied the charges against him. He argued that not only was he innocent of all three unfounded charges — corruption, fraud and breach of trust in three cases — he was being framed based on a police investigation that had not been authorized legally by the attorney general. Throughout the lengthy hearing, his lawyers bombarded the judges with various and sundry arguments, which peaked with a demand to delay the evidentiary stage of the trial until after the elections.
A prelude to this demand was provided the day before by Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin, one of Netanyahu’s staunchest loyalists — the man who heads the legislative branch of government. Levin conveyed a barely veiled threat to the judges, arguing that if they schedule the evidentiary phase to begin prior to the elections, they could be influencing the democratic process.
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