The New Yorker: Citizens are innocent until proven guilty, but Prime Ministers are not mere citizens. According to Israeli law, Prime Ministers need not resign unless they are convicted of a serious crime. But precedent holds that Prime Ministers should not serve if they are merely indicted—that, once indicted, they cannot both prepare a legal defense and properly do their job. In 1977, Yitzhak Rabin resigned from his first term when it was discovered that his wife, Leah, had maintained an illegal, though paltry, foreign bank account after he served as Ambassador to Washington. In 2008, Ehud Olmert announced that he would resign before being indicted for having taken bribes when he was the mayor of Jerusalem. “I will step aside properly in an honorable and responsible way, and afterwards I will prove my innocence,” Olmert said. (He was eventually exonerated on the original charges, though he served more than a year in prison after a retrial for breach of trust and witness tampering, which he denied.)

Yesterday, after a yearlong investigation, the Israeli police recommended that the Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on various counts of bribery. Netanyahu has responded with defiance, attacking the integrity of the police and implicitly exhorting Mandelblit, whom he appointed, to disregard the recommendations. “Nothing will have sway and nothing will sway me, not even the incessant attacks against me,” Netanyahu said. Indeed, his defiance has been building for some time. Last summer, as one investigation seemed to climax, Netanyahu, sounding eerily like Donald Trump, told a rally of three thousand supporters in Tel Aviv that the left and “the fake-news media” were engaged “in an obsessive, unprecedented witch hunt against me and my family.” They constituted “a massive and united chorus faintheartedly urging withdrawal from territories in our homeland.” The crowd broke out singing, “Bibi, King of Israel!” Oren Hazan, a Likud member of the Knesset, called the state prosecutor’s office “a stable that’s full of crap.”

The first case in the recommendations, known as Case 1000, concerns Netanyahu allegedly receiving almost three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gifts from the Israeli-born Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and the Australian businessman James Packer. (The gifts are said to have included pricey cigars and champagne.) The quo for the quid, allegedly, was Netanyahu’s lobbying for a law that would extend the period in which Israelis returning to Israel after living abroad could enjoy a tax holiday. (Both men deny that the gifts were intended as bribes.) The erstwhile finance minister whom Netanyahu lobbied—and whose testimony is an integral part of the police case—was Yair Lapid, the head of the opposition Yesh Atid Party, and currently Netanyahu’s chief rival. At the same time, Netanyahu allegedly lobbied then Secretary of State John Kerry to extend Milchan’s U.S. visa, and helped Milchan with investments in Israeli television.

The second case, Case 2000, involves Netanyahu’s alleged effort to secure more flattering coverage from the mass-circulation tabloid Yediot Aharonot by suggesting to its publisher, Arnon Mozes, that he would hamper the growth of Israel Hayom, a rival tabloid owned by a Netanyahu ally, the American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. (Adelson reportedly told the police, last year, that Netanyahu had tried to persuade him to back off from plans to expand Israel Hayom.) From its start, in 2007, Israel Hayom has attacked Netanyahu’s opponents; by 2014, Adelson allegedly had lost as much as two hundred million dollars on the newspaper. That Netanyahu could presume to scale it back without alienating Adelson might suggest that the paper could be considered an undeclared foreign campaign contribution, which contravenes Israeli election law. But the police ignored that line of inquiry, sticking to the more provable charge.

The cases are hardly airtight. “The problem is proving intention of wrong doing, mens rea, the premeditated giving-and-getting specific benefits,” Frances Raday, a professor emerita of law at Hebrew University, told me. On the whole, the charges in Case 2000 should be easier to prove, since recordings of conversations between Netanyahu and Mozes have been found on the cell phone of Netanyahu’s former chief of staff Ari Harow, who, last summer, signed a plea deal and became a state witness. “The police are recommending that Mandelblit indict Milchan as well, presumably in the hope that Milchan will flip the way Harow did,” Raday said >>>