In a fiery Hanukkah speech to his fellow Likud party stalwarts a year ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the Israeli left for the corruption investigations engulfing him, saying that because his opponents couldn’t defeat him at the ballot box, “they tried to beat us with slander.”
On Sunday, he addressed the same audience on the same holiday in the same place on the same subject, but the target of his ire was not the Israeli left. It was the outgoing Israeli police chief, his own appointee, who oversaw the investigations that have resulted in three recommendations that Mr. Netanyahu be indicted on bribery and fraud charges.
He is still playing the victim. But if his legal troubles spell the end of his storied career — and no one is writing him off yet — the evidence uncovered by the police suggests that Mr. Netanyahu will have only himself to blame.
For a decade now, Mr. Netanyahu has led Israel like no other leader since the nation’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, personifying and championing the country on the world stage, dominating Israelis’ self-perception, eclipsing and marginalizing opponents and right-wing rivals alike, and steadily remaking its politics in his image.
Yet throughout his political life, his detractors have discerned in Mr. Netanyahu an unseemly obsession with his public image, even for a politician. And his present troubles arose out of what amounted to his most audacious attempt to gain control over that image: a long-term offensive on the news media itself.
For a prime minister who sees himself as a historic figure — protecting Israel against Iran’s regional ambitions, providing Jews the world over with a haven from anti-Semitism — the prospect that he could be brought low by self-regard is practically Shakespearean, said Dan Shadur, the director of the new documentary “King Bibi: The Life and Performances of Benjamin Netanyahu.”
“He’s so obsessed with his reputation that it’s actually threatening his rule,” Mr. Shadur said.
The drama began in 2007 with the launch of Israel Hayom, a free daily newspaper financed by the American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a devoted supporter of Mr. Netanyahu’s. It was mocked as “Bibiton,” a portmanteau of Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, Bibi, and the Hebrew word for newspaper. But its wide readership and cheap advertising rates quickly weakened rival papers.
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