00:01:18.880This is a film that I produced and it was directed by Alexis Bloom.
00:01:22.140And back in 2023, I got a strange message on Signal from somebody who said that they had all of the police interrogation videos from the Benjamin Netanyahu investigation.
00:01:36.940And they had been investigating Netanyahu since 2016 for charges of corruption, that is to say, trading on his position as prime minister to get money in all sorts of favors, jewelry for his wife, very expensive Cuban cigars,
00:01:56.900hundreds of millions of dollars in forgiveness of certain loans in order to be able to get
00:02:07.420favorable coverage on a news website called Walla. So it was a pretty interesting case,
00:02:14.400and it went from the very small, meaning very expensive Cuban cigars from a rather famous
00:02:21.680movie producer named Arnon Milchan to something very big, which is effectively a $250 million
00:02:28.200financial arrangement in exchange for coverage, good coverage for Netanyahu. So it was a pretty
00:02:36.000big deal. So you got the tapes. Let me just ask, to the extent you can say, where did they come
00:02:44.240from? I can't say where they came from. I can't say anything about the source. But what I can
00:02:51.520say is we got over a thousand hours of tapes. And these were interviews with Netanyahu himself
00:02:57.160by the police, also Netanyahu's wife, Sarah, his son, Yair, also with a number of key people close
00:03:03.880to Netanyahu, for example, near Hefetz, his former head of communications. Sheldon Adelson,
00:03:10.180who we know in this country as a billionaire, now deceased, his wife, Miriam Adelson,
00:03:16.060Arnon Milchan, a famous Israeli businessman, arms dealer, who also became a very famous
00:03:21.440a motion picture producer. So it was a kind of an extraordinary array of evidence. And while
00:03:29.840some of this evidence had been published in Israel in written form, nobody had seen the tapes. And
00:03:36.080the tapes are very revealing, particularly for Netanyahu, because Netanyahu tries to cultivate
00:03:40.700this image of the grand vizier, the great statesman of Israel. Here you see a rather
00:03:47.620petty corrupt man desperately lying to save his skin and and his wife who is a deeply
00:03:54.420entitled woman you know trying to claim that so what if we got stuff i mean we deserve it because
00:04:01.220we're doing so much for for the nation and for the world and his son yair who is also extremely
00:04:07.200entitled screaming at the police yelling you know you're like the the stasi so it was an illuminating
00:04:13.600look at the actual character behind the facade, sort of like that moment in The Wizard of
00:04:19.780Oz where, you know, Toto pulls back the curtain and the wizard says, please pay no attention.
00:04:28.340If you can, and I think people watching this will watch the film, but I'm interested in
00:04:34.400your take, having watched a thousand hours of this, what is it, can you go more deeply
00:04:39.260into what do you think it reveals about the prime minister and his character?
00:04:42.520Well, I think it reveals, I think, a kind of deep-seated corruption, a willingness to do almost anything to save his skin.
00:04:51.220I think that he became possessed after the election in 2015 of a sense of enormous arrogance, that he was now the man.
00:05:01.440Because he came back from what seemed to be a defeat to an enormous victory, and now he had this sense of entitlement.
00:05:10.880Interestingly, then he began to, you know, cash in on that entitlement and he was caught.
00:05:19.740But what happened then was that rather, you know, as he heard the sound of the possibility of the jail door slamming shut on him, he began to start to do things that really took Israel in a very dark direction.
00:05:36.840The first thing he tried to do was to essentially fix the Department of Justice.
00:05:46.680He tried to engage in a series of—this is before October 7th—he tried to engage in a series of reforms of the judicial system, which would weaken the power of the judiciary in Israel.
00:06:01.580most likely because that would undermine the case against him that's the most direct
00:06:09.760likely outcome but the other thing was that by this time he had formed a government with an
00:06:14.900extremely right-wing coalition with a guy named um ben gavir who is a head of national security
00:06:21.200and a guy named smotrick who's a is a head of the um of finance they are extremely right-wing
00:06:27.880extremely anti-Palestinian and their designs were to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank
00:06:34.960and in some cases well well it was already a dire situation for Palestinians on the West Bank
00:06:41.500nevertheless there would be judicial orders which would sometimes get in the way of that that was
00:06:46.380another aspect of this well when Netanyahu tried to fix the judiciary the country rose up and it
00:06:54.060was in a huge uproar over these changes, which were fundamentally undermining Israel's democracy.
00:07:02.940Not too long after, of course, there was the terrible attack by Hamas on October 7th, which shocked Israel.
00:07:14.760um what people began to learn was that for years netanyahu again i think
00:07:22.420as part of the way he sees the world and as part of a kind of more generalized sense of corruption
00:07:28.880had been trying to modulate the relationship with hamas and indeed had been allowing millions and
00:07:35.120millions of dollars to flow to hamas from qatar um sometimes in bags of cash traveling through
00:07:42.200Israel. And the reason he was doing that was to undermine the Palestinian authority on the West
00:07:48.960Bank in order to be able to allow for his right-wing coalition to get more and more territory
00:07:56.220via settlement. So all sorts of strange, corrupt deals were happening. But then I think that post
00:08:02.54010-7, which was a terrible moment, I don't want to minimize it in any way, it was a horrific attack,
00:08:11.940And we show some of that attack in the film.
00:08:14.520But he then launched an attack on Gaza, which was so beyond any sense of proportionality.
00:08:24.420Now we have at least over 75,000 people dead.
00:08:27.300Of course, now we have an Iran war and a Lebanon war and so forth and so on.
00:08:30.480But one of the goals, I'm convinced, and not me, but all of the witnesses who are, you know, very reputable members of the security establishment in Israel,
00:08:41.000in the film, indicate that part of the enduring ferocity, savagery of the war was due to
00:08:53.500becoming a wartime president who could then not be prosecuted or successfully prosecuted
00:09:01.300for the crimes he had committed. The trial, not only the investigation, but now there's
00:09:07.660been a trial. The trial is still ongoing. This is 10 years after the investigation started. So
00:09:12.760long as he's the commander in chief and he's waging war, how dare you attack the president?
00:09:18.780So in a way, this kind of venal personal corruption that starts with cigars and pink
00:09:25.820champagne for which they had code names, you know, and then evolves into corrupt deals relating to
00:09:33.760media becomes a mechanism by which slowly but surely the corruption got greater and greater
00:09:39.920and greater until it became a moral corruption in which the world is now engulfed we've got a
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00:11:45.220There were people in Israel in public right after October 7th,
00:11:51.000which clearly was committed by Hamas and was clearly terrible.
00:11:54.140I agree with that. I want to be clear.
00:11:55.940But there were a bunch of people, including people I knew who said, wait a second, you know, this couldn't have happened if the government of Israel had really tried to prevent it.
00:12:07.660Okay, so there's something very strange about the ability of Hamas fighters on motorbikes and gliders and on foot coming across the most heavily guarded border in the world and the delay in the response of the IDF to this.
00:12:20.240Like, what is this? And it's almost forbidden to say that, as you know, in the United States.
00:12:25.140But tell me what people you spoke to in Israel now believe about that attack.
00:12:30.500I should point out that when you say I spoke to, I mean, the person who directed the film was Alexis Bloom.
00:12:41.880In any event, I think there were a lot of people who felt that a proper investigation into what Netanyahu knew about the possible impending attack by Hamas should be commenced.
00:12:56.980However, that got rolled under the carpet because of the fact that he's now in a war with Hamas.
00:13:04.680I mean, Hamas doesn't really have an air force.
00:13:09.360But I think there was a lot of talk about how much and what advance warning Netanyahu may have had about the October 7th attacks.
00:13:20.040I've never seen prima facie evidence of that fact, but there's certainly a lot of talk about it in Israel.
00:13:27.220Okay, so it's not just crazy people on the Internet who think it's possible or likely that Benjamin Netanyahu knew this was coming, had some sense it was coming, didn't do his best to prevent the damage within Israel.
00:13:39.360that because he was in this politically tough spot and the ensuing war would take the attention
00:13:45.260off him and allow him a pass on the charges is that a fair summation i personally think it may
00:13:50.740be a bit too cynical to think that that that he literally engendered an attack in order to be able
00:13:56.640to counter-attack but i do think that he had deluded himself in part because he he thought
00:14:03.180of the world as a series of deals he had deluded himself in into the idea that he had manipulated
00:14:10.040hamas and all the money that was flowing to hamas yeah um you know wasn't going to go to weapons
00:14:16.340and preparing an attack i mean he kept saying what's the phrase it's in the film um uh that
00:14:23.260that he could control the height of the flames by by the introduction of money or and he also
00:14:31.060When he's talking to the police, he says, keep your friends close and your enemies closer as if he was the Don and sort of able to manipulate events.
00:14:52.800I think most Israelis are genuinely shocked that it happened and they're horrified.
00:14:57.040And a lot of the world is genuinely shocked and horrified, including me.
00:15:01.060But then this war begins in Gaza or this leveling of Gaza, this mass murder in Gaza, and then it expands to a lot of the regions in the Levant and now into Iran.
00:15:14.420Is it too cynical to think that one of the motives there from the prime minister is to just keep moving forward because if he stops, he gets arrested?
00:15:26.640Well, it may be a little bit too cynical.
00:15:29.920I mean, maybe Netanyahu's wanted to attack Iran for years.
00:15:34.480In fact, they did another film about that subject called Zero Days.
00:15:39.500But I do think that once the momentum of war began, and I would say also that to some extent, the momentum of war began to have a certain popular impact among the populace in Israel, too.
00:15:54.160That now there was an opportunity to go after more enemies.
00:15:59.320So and it had the byproduct, of course, as long as there's war, as long as there's permanent war, Netanyahu will never be held to account.
00:16:06.980So once again, I think it may be a bit too cynical to say he attacked Iran so he wouldn't go to jail.
00:16:12.580But I think it had been a longstanding desire for Netanyahu to want to really go after Iran.
00:16:19.700And now both once he'd started the war in Gaza, but also, I think, with the Trump administration coming to power in 2024, suddenly he had an opportunity.
00:17:30.780And I think it would be a mistake to think that he's unpopular.
00:17:34.200We'll find out very soon, you know, when elections happen.
00:17:37.980But I think that as long as you're waging war, people tend to rally around the commander in chief, which I think is both a cynical ploy by Netanyahu and also a longstanding goal of his to be able to wage war across the Levant and expand Israel's power and influence.
00:17:58.980Did you get a sense of his religious views?
00:18:03.260I think of Netanyahu is, well, honestly, he's pretty American and Western and secular.
00:18:10.220But in his, I mean, the first statement he gave after the war in Iran began, he began with today's Torah portion.
00:18:15.820And he's been saying things like that a lot.
00:18:18.120Do you have an opinion on what he thinks, what his spiritual views are?
00:18:24.340I mean, I think that to some extent, I see him more as a politician.
00:18:31.860Now, I don't have access to what his real views are.
00:18:36.540But when you hear politicians quoting scripture, in effect, it tends to be for the reason that they're trying to undergird their policies with the force of God.
00:18:56.040It's an old script, and I think Netanyahu knows very well that it's an effective one.
00:19:19.940And we can also see that this hard right-wing faction has wreaked havoc on the West Bank.
00:19:29.400And, you know, settlements are expanding apace in a really reprehensible way.
00:19:36.180There's lots of, you know, it's sort of out of the public eye.
00:19:40.560But that, I think, was one of the goals from the beginning, you know, with reckoning with Hamas and all of this stuff.
00:19:48.960But also, you know, because Netanyahu, in order to stay in power, another corrupt deal, he makes a deal with a hard right and then goes very hard right.
00:19:57.500It's not like he was ever a peacenik, but now he goes very, very, very hard right and at the great expense of the lives and livelihoods of many Palestinians.
00:20:11.240Yeah. I don't know if it's right or not. I'm on the right and I hate this. I hate violence.
00:20:15.500And there were reports this morning of in the Israeli press of mass rapes of Palestinians by settlers in the West Bank.
00:20:22.840So, like, I think that's just the degree of violence by the by by by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank is rapacious.
00:20:30.560I mean, it's it's and it goes on day after day after day after day.
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00:26:22.360I felt they shed a really important light on a vital figure in world politics, and that's in Yahoo.
00:26:30.460And so it seemed to me that that's my job.
00:26:35.400And when I find out important information about public figures that shed light on wars and how we reckon with the world, that it's my job to get that story out.
00:26:50.160So I actually didn't pause, but it took a while to figure out because I'm not a network, you know, I'm an independent filmmaker and it took a while to figure out how to raise the money, how to and also to do it in secret so that nobody would subpoena the tapes or, you know, prevent me from from getting to the end.
00:27:13.540So, you know, Alexis and I had to proceed, you know, for some time in secret.
00:27:20.020But, you know, I felt it was really important material and really important to get it out.
00:27:26.520Good for you. How hard was it to raise the money?
00:27:29.460It was hard, but not, as it turns out, impossible.
00:27:32.840So, and there were a number of people who also, once they were able to see a little bit of what we had, came forward and helped.
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00:29:11.620I think that we live in a moment where people all over the world, including in this country, are making it difficult for independent voices to be heard.
00:29:28.580But I feel like even though, and I'm glad, you know, TCN is showing BB files on its network, and it has had, you know, pretty good international distribution.
00:29:42.580The distribution here has been somewhat handicapped.
00:29:49.100I mean, it seems like even if I disagreed with your views, which I don't know that I do, I don't think I do, but I would just stop at you have relevant information, that's real, about one of the key players in global politics.
00:30:04.940So like that alone justifies this, in my opinion.
00:30:08.880And so the idea that you would have distribution problems in the United States is a little scary, and I'd love to know more about what those problems are.
00:30:16.200I think one of the problems is that the market in general is controversy averse.
00:30:24.640You know, you have a number of streamers who don't want to upset their viewers.
00:30:30.400You have news organizations, which in this case, as I've documented, you know, also didn't want to be on the wrong side of an issue that might upset people.
00:30:39.520I mean, it seems to me that the job, you know, because I do think that four years ago, roughly speaking, you know, if I had gone out into the marketplace with the BB files, there would have been a bidding war.
00:30:54.840But now it's kind of just the opposite.
00:30:57.120It's like we don't want to do anything that might upset people because then they won't buy sneakers or they won't buy iPads.
00:31:07.700And I and I think part of it is that controversy has become problematic and also powerful political figures are exerting influence on broadcasting outlets to toe the line.
00:31:22.960And sometimes if you're not, you know, you don't have a regular show, you don't get a hearing.
00:31:29.880So it's a problem. It's a really big problem.
00:31:31.940I think the, you know, while I'm critical of the mainstream press, particularly in this instance, you know, I believe strongly in the idea of a free press and I'm deeply upset about the way not only Netanyahu did in Israel, but the way the Trump administration is trying to suppress a free press in this country.
00:32:01.940And, you know, I guess I've been doing it, I've been an independent, a freelance since, geez, since the 1980s.
00:32:13.320So somehow, someway, I've been, you know, managing to scrape by.
00:32:18.420And I've never really worked for an organization, except for the small company that is Chigsaw Productions, which is my company.
00:32:25.200Have you ever seen an environment this difficult for someone who wants to present newsworthy, inherently newsworthy material like the tapes in this documentary?
00:32:35.260not really there was another period in the late 90s um in this country i remember trying to do
00:32:44.140a film about it was critical of henry kissinger and uh i had a i had an easy the bbc was was
00:32:50.580actually heroic in that instance but i could find no finders here and it's only by going to
00:32:55.300um i think we played at the film forum for something like three months that finally
00:32:59.920It allowed, because it was then entertainment, it allowed a broadcaster to show it.
00:33:04.960It was difficult then, but it's much more fraught now.
00:33:07.960I think it's very, very, very hard to get independent voices heard.
00:33:16.680It's really unprecedented in my experience, this moment.
00:33:22.000That's certainly my feeling, but I don't have the 40-year perspective that you do.
00:33:25.340So, but I admire your dedication to a free press, your bravery in doing this and your willingness to explain it to us and to air it on TCN.