The Free Press
JERUSALEM — Even those accustomed to the roiling wrestling ring that is Israeli politics can’t remember a week like the last one.
Multiple aides to Israel’s own prime minister, people operating in the most rarefied sanctuary of our leadership and state security, are accused of doing paid side jobs for Qatar, an enemy state. Two have been arrested.
The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has not been urging law enforcement to get to the bottom of the case, as one might expect. Instead, he’s been releasing TikTok videos calling his arrested aides “hostages” and accusing Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, along with the police and legal system, of running a “deep state” conspiracy to bring him down.
This is all happening as 59 actual hostages and bodies of hostages remain in the hands of Hamas, as Israel’s reserve army shows signs of cracking under the strain of a year and a half of combat, and as millions of Israelis are woken at night by incoming ballistic missiles fired by the Houthis, the Iranian proxy in Yemen. Israelis have seen a lot in our 77-year history, but we haven’t seen anything quite like this. The crisis in government that has been brewing under Netanyahu’s rule seems to be coming to a head.
Many of the details of “Qatargate,” as Israeli reporters are calling the new affair, are still under a police gag order. The two aides arrested so far are Yonatan Urich, Netanyahu’s media brain and close confidant, and Eli Feldstein, who has served as his defense spokesman during the current war. A third associate wanted for questioning is holed up in Serbia, and two other suspects, neither of them Netanyahu aides, are under house arrest, according to Israeli media reports. (One, for reasons that aren’t yet clear, is the editor of The Jerusalem Post, who visited Qatar at the regime’s invitation last year.) Feldstein, astonishingly, seems to have been working for Israel’s prime minister while having his salary paid by Qatar via a middleman. According to the Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal of the daily Yedioth Ahronot, quoting court documents Tuesday, the aides are suspected of working to “publicly promote Qatar in a positive light,” particularly as a mediator in the negotiations for Israeli hostages, while simultaneously working for Netanyahu.
Improving Qatari credibility in Israeli eyes would have the effect of doing the same where it really matters: in Washington.
Netanyahu himself was questioned by police on Monday, though not as a suspect. The suspicions facing his aides include contact with a foreign agent and fraud. The suspects deny wrongdoing, but don’t seem to be denying the contacts with Qatar outright, suggesting that they’ll argue their actions didn’t break any laws, not that they didn’t happen.
Doing paid work for a foreign power would be damning even if the power in question was an Israeli ally—you simply cannot pursue the interests of your nation if your bank account depends on another nation. But Qatar is an enemy. The Qataris have funded Hamas and have long provided a welcoming home for the Hamas leadership, and they celebrate terrorism against Israelis on their propaganda channel Al Jazeera, which serves as a Hamas mouthpiece. If the revelations are true, the crimes would be very close to treason.
Amid all of this, Netanyahu announced last week that he was firing Shin Bet’s director, Ronen Bar, who’s in charge of the investigation—something that has never happened before. The move was temporarily frozen by Supreme Court order because of the obvious conflict of interest. Then, on Monday, Netanyahu hurriedly announced the director’s replacement, only to bizarrely rescind the new appointment less than 24 hours later. Israelis are left with the impression of a governing system divided against itself, and of an unstable leader who, after a decade and a half of nearly uninterrupted power, seems no longer to perceive any difference between his own interests and that of the state.
“The ruling party put out a statement saying the secret service is carrying out a coup by using arrest warrants,” the Channel 12 journalist Yair Cherki told viewers on Monday as he tried to wrap his head around the current state of affairs. “The suspicions facing the people in Netanyahu’s orbit are that with Israel at war with Hamas, they worked for the state that funded Hamas.” Israelis, he said, have to step back and imagine how this looks to external observers “to get a moment of perspective on what’s going on and to understand the level of insanity of what we’re experiencing.”
Since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, many around the world have become aware of the influence of Qatar, the petro-dictatorship whose money is omnipresent in think tanks, universities, sports franchises, and real-estate projects across the West, often on multiple sides of a given issue or conflict. If you noticed, for example, that the Qataris host the leadership of Hamas, you’d also have to notice that the same Qataris have come to host a crucial American military base. If you noticed that the Qataris demonize Israelis on Al Jazeera, you’d also have to notice that the same Qataris have somehow become mediators in negotiations for Israeli hostages, and have also done some real-estate business with the hostage envoy of the Trump administration.
Qatari money is like fingerprints that appear when an ultraviolet light turns on.
Before October 7, 2023, as British writer and Free Press columnist Douglas Murray wrote in an article calling for divestment from Qatar, “the smell of sulfur around the Qataris was covered up somewhat by expensive scent.” That changed with the Hamas attack, at least for observers sympathetic to Israel, when the depth of Qatar’s ties to Hamas and the ambitious scope of its influence became clear. But few suspected that the ultraviolet light would turn up a new fingerprint—in Israel itself.
It’s not yet clear what Netanyahu knew about the alleged Qatari contacts among his associates. But as Roni Alsheikh—a former police commissioner appointed under Netanyahu, and a Shin Bet official whose politics lie to the right—put it in a radio interview last week, “the connection with Qatar was built on Netanyahu’s desk.”
He was referring to Netanyahu’s decision to allow the Qataris to transfer millions of dollars a year in cash to Hamas beginning in 2018, in the hope of buying quiet in Gaza. The idea was that economic stability would help moderate Hamas, the same logic that led Israel to approve thousands of work permits for Gazans before October 7, 2023. The decision to transfer the money from Qatar turned out to be disastrous, but it’s one that can be defended as an error made in good faith. If Qatari money was making its way into Netanyahu’s own office, however, scrambling the priorities and conscience of his staff and exposing classified information to people in the employ of a hostile government, no such defense is valid.
A previous head of Shin Bet, Yoram Cohen, also a Netanyahu appointee, said in an interview that the fact that Feldstein, the suspect whose salary is said to have been paid by Qatar, and who was denied security clearance by Shin Bet for reasons that are still unclear, should never have been anywhere near the prime minister. “Someone like this, it doesn’t matter who he is, who is working for another country in wartime, in this case a country antagonistic to Israel and supportive of Hamas, is something terrible, awful, and out of bounds,” Cohen said. What we know so far, he warned, is only a fraction of the affair. Figures from the Israeli intelligence world, including from the political right, are signaling that the Israeli public has reason for acute concern.
In a poll this weekend, Israelis were asked if they trust their government. Seventy percent said no, compared to just 27 percent who said yes. Even among those who voted for the current government, just over half said yes, while over a third—36 percent—said no. Polls show Netanyahu trailing his younger rival and former protégé Naftali Bennett, also a right-winger, but one perceived as a unifying figure.
While all this goes on, Israeli citizens of all political stripes are meant to keep paying taxes to what our prime minister is telling us is the “deep state”—that English term from the Donald Trump dictionary having now been transferred, thanks to Netanyahu, directly and without translation into Hebrew, an American script being tried out on an Israeli audience that has never heard it before. (Netanyahu has also introduced Hebrew speakers to the term fake news.) We’re meant to show up for military service, even though Netanyahu supports a draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox on whom his coalition depends. We’re to believe that Netanyahu, who has been in power since the first Avatar came out, is actually an embattled opposition facing a progressive hegemony, and that everything wrong is someone else’s fault. We’re to trust that when Shin Bet agents detect Iranian penetration or kill a Hamas terrorist, they’re on our side, but when they detect Qatari penetration, they’re engaged in a leftist vendetta against the prime minister.
America, a superpower with friendly neighbors, might be able to survive this style of governance, at least for a while. Israel doesn’t have the same margin of error. For us, the stakes are life and death—and this kind of self-inflicted crisis is one we can’t afford.
For more on Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest controversies, read Michael Oren’s piece, “How Does Bibi Survive?”