‘The Bibi Files’

Benjamin Netanyahu is a crook.

That’s a controversial way to begin a story, but it’s the inescapable conclusion a viewer takes from watching “The Bibi Files,” a powerful and damning documentary about a scandal that is the Israeli equivalent of Watergate, Deep Throat and all.

“The Bibi Files” accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not only of receiving bribes but of soliciting them. Moreover, it suggests that his efforts to stay in office to prevent future investigations may be responsible for prolonging the war in Gaza.

Although the situation has been going on since 2016, the filmmakers got involved early last year, when the documentarian Alex Gibney (who won an Academy Award for “Taxi to the Dark Side”) was leaked footage of Bibi, his wife, Sara, and others being interrogated by the police about possible corruption.

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Ms. Gibney asked Alexis Bloom — they’d collaborated before — to take on the task of organizing and directing the project. In a Zoom interview, Ms. Bloom sadly didn’t provide any information about the film’s Deep Throat, but she did say a lot about the behind-the-scenes process:

“We don’t talk about how or where we got the leaked interrogation videos to protect the source,” she said. But the leak was massive and presented an immediate logistical problem.

“It was over 1,000 hours [of tapes] in a language you don’t understand,” she noted. “The material was out of sync. The sound didn’t always match up with the picture and was of poor quality. So it was a challenge. Not something presented to us wrapped up in a little bow.”

It required substantial post-production work to clean up and make the tapes viewable. “The Israeli police are not famous for their pristine recordings, and they are not camera people.”

There was also the need to “be extremely vigorous in fact checking, about really understanding what it is that we had. My challenge was also to distill it to something that an American audience with no familiarity with the subject would be willing to engage with.”

The chances are that most Americans are unfamiliar with the level of the Netanyahus’ corruption charges. Both have been in trouble in the past, so none of this is new to Israelis.

The latest incidents actually involve three cases, all of which will be tried together. In one, Bibi is accused of accepting gifts worth almost $300,000. In another, he is charged with making a deal for favorable coverage with Arnon Moses, publisher of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. In exchange, Bibi reportedly promised to limit the circulation of a rival. Finally, he is accused of exerting influence on coverage by the Israeli news website Walla in exchange for furthering legislation that benefitted the site’s owner to the tune of $500 million.

Netanyahu is set to testify at his trial this week; his first day on the stand was Tuesday.

The bribery story is said to have started with high-value gifts — expensive liquor, a box of Cohibas cigars — and ended with jewelry valued at thousands of dollars. In the film, Raviv Drucker, an investigative journalist and persistent Netanyahu critic, explains that “when you continue to do something wrong 10, 20 times and you continue to get away with it, you begin to think you are immune.”

Among others interviewed was one of Bibi’s childhood friends, who claims “Bibi’s lawyers told him to resign but he was afraid more details would come out if he wasn’t in power.”

The cops noted that Bibi “responded to 95% of our questions with ‘I don’t remember.’”

When he did recall, he claimed he couldn’t be held responsible if longtime friends showed up for dinner with gifts. But an assistant to billionaire Arnon Milchan, the Israeli-American filmmaker and former Israeli spy ensnared in the case, told Ms. Bloom that “There’s no such thing as showing up empty-handed.”

There was so much material, Ms. Bloom said, that “one of the difficult things was figuring out what to leave in and what to leave out.”

The prime minister was given several opportunities to answer the charges, but he declined. Instead, he went to court in Israel, trying to block the premiere of the film at the Toronto Film Festival.

“He generally doesn’t respond to outlets that he doesn’t regard as being absolutely on his side,” Ms. Bloom said. “The only other person to receive an affirmative yes was an American interviewer, Dr. Phil. That is the sort of interview Netanyahu says yes to at the moment.”

Ms. Bloom got involved in June 2023. I asked her how October 7 changed things. “We always wanted to approach the subject with respect, but in light of October 7, we felt a greater burden of responsibility,” Ms. Bloom said. “But we found that people still wanted to talk about Netanyahu, and this story and his family’s story didn’t change.

“Israel’s story may have changed, but our film was always about Netanyahu and how his corruption and his trial for corruption was impacting his ability to lead. Being in a war didn’t change that. He’d already made an alliance with the extreme right, and the war didn’t change that. In fact, he strengthened his alliance.”

Also, he has used the war to delay the trial, Ms. Bloom said. “The longer the war goes on, the more he can say, ‘I can’t stand trial.’ It’s exactly what his lawyers have said. They said it last week.

“It’s interesting. You should see when they file. They file at night to try to avoid the press. As one of my Israeli colleagues said, like thieves in the night they file to keep him out of court. It is factually accurate to say that the war helps him in his corruption trial.”

Of course, these are interesting times when it comes to Israel and there exists the possibility that the film can somehow be conflated with antisemitism. Ms. Bloom was born in Johannesburg to intermarried parents, but she was raised as a Jew. “Most of my family is Jewish,” she said. “I was probably 7 when I went to Israel for the first time. I have an ongoing relationship with Israel.”

As for the film, it seems unlikely anyone can play the antisemitism card. “The Israeli attorney general, who he [Netanyahu] appointed himself” — that’s Avichai Mandelblit — “is a religious Jewish man who nobody expected to indict him. That’s who indicted him. Such was the volume of evidence against him.

“Every single interview subject in this film is Israeli. I don’t know how anyone can say that this is an antisemitic film when everyone in the film is Jewish.”

“The Bibi Files” opened in New York on December 11. A new way to see the film that avoids tolls and possible congestion pricing is to go to Jolt.film and watch it for $12, supporting independent filmmaking in the process.