Tribune. The news fell on November 21 at 8 pm: Avichaï Mandelblit, Attorney General of the State of Israel, announced the indictment of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, under three charges of fraud, corruption, and breach of trust. Barely an hour later, Mr. Netanyahu appeared live on all the news channels. Against a backdrop of national flags lined up dramatically behind him, he uttered a speech in an offended and hurt voice.
For all those who have tried to understand him, his words are troubling. In the first part of his speech, Mr. Netanyahu considers himself Alfred Dreyfus: a weak and discriminated ideological victim, pursued for his convictions by the police and the all-powerful justice. In the second part, he presents himself rather like Louis XIV: a powerful sovereign, omnipotent, who considers any attempt to separate his own destiny from that of the country as a diabolical conspiracy of the enemies of the Jewish people, who wish the destruction of the State Israel.
The rhetorical effect of this paradoxical cocktail is worrying: if Mr. Netanyahu is really that sublime character who – according to his son Yair, at a private event in New York – took over a weak and marginal nation living from the orange trade to a rich, modern and admired technological power in the world, then how can such a strong leader be so helpless in the face of the treachery of officials appointed by him? How has such a talented sovereign, who has been intermittently prime minister for nearly twenty-five years, and without interruption for ten years, succeeded in founding and consolidating, during such a long reign, a a treacherous and leftist police and legal system, who dares to defeat his almighty ruler with empty slanders?
The image of Nero
Mr. Netanyahu's contradictory discourse exposes the megalomaniac and persecuted dual nature of the character. At the same time able to talk for hours about Israel, the only democratic and egalitarian country in the Middle East, and, at the same time, to pretend without blinking that a government in which Israeli Arab parties would participate would be "A historic national attack" and to warn, the very day of the elections, against "Arabs who flock to the polls by whole buses".
And the further Mr. Netanyahu's legal situation deteriorates, the more his bipolar personality, caught between the all-powerful enlightened ruler and the persecuted Jew of the diaspora, is exacerbated and leads him to regions of unprecedented absurdity. That is how a prime minister in office can describe "Coup attempt" his indictment for dishonesty, because if Mr. Netanyahu is the state, any accusation against him is a slander to the state; and any attempt to put him behind bars is nothing less than malicious action against the State of Israel. Deprived of the direction of this genius, the country would overnight lose all its technological capabilities and become a weakened nation that gives itself to oranges.
