LETTER FROM JERUSALEM
Soon, Nir Hefetz will fall back into anonymity. For three years, this fifth-rank figure in the comedy of Israeli power has unwittingly been in the spotlight. In March 2018, he agreed to testify in court against his former master, the former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prosecuted for breach of trust, corruption and fraud. At the end of December 2021, this former journalist who became a communicator in the service of Mr. Netanyahu and his family completed his appearance. At the end of five weeks of hearing, the press is tired of him.
This week, the judges are looking at his case one last time: on Monday January 10, they heard the police officers who questioned him in 2018, and who convinced him to testify for the prosecution. Mr. Hefetz compared their methods to those used by the Shin Bet (the internal intelligence service) on Palestinian detainees in the occupied territories. He was shocked to meet in the corridors of the police headquarters a woman he was close to, summoned by investigators, then his wife. The police assured him that his family was “In existential danger”. On Tuesday, one of them told the judges, partly under the seal of secrecy, that these procedures were not “Special”.
Before Mr Hefetz steps aside, it helps to dwell on this key witness to an all-around unprecedented trial, which saw a prime minister scrapping justice for three years, until his fall in June 2021, and which will keep Mr. Netanyahu, now leader of the opposition, busy for a long time. Mr. Hefetz, 57, occasionally doubles his short sentences of stares, pinched smile, receding chin, to journalists attending the hearings. He was one of them and despises them – “A gang of leftists”, he said.
Without a known political opinion, he admits to having been a journalist under the orders of his owners: Arnon Mozes, boss of the big daily Yedihot Aharonot and sworn enemy of Mr. Netanyahu, also prosecuted for corruption in this trial. Then the investor Nochi Dankner, who bought the daily Maariv, before being convicted of money laundering.
Netanyahu’s media obsession
Mr. Hefetz worked for Mr. Netanyahu in 2009, then from 2014 to 2017. Ex-advisor, communicator, carrier of messages, he complacently expands on the obsession with the media which, according to him, guides Mr. Netanyahu . On his “Control madness” of the press. On the hours spent listening to him oppose ” them “ – the enemy press – and ” we “ – the right. On his efforts to place loyal columnists in the country’s dailies. On his trips to foreign billionaires, whom Mr. Netanyahu hoped to convince to create an Israeli Fox News, or to invest in media that would serve his cause: Australian Rupert Murdoch, American Larry Elison, the most UK rich Len Blavatnik (who bought a dominant stake in small chain 13), and Mathias Döpfner, the boss of the German press group Axel Springer.
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