ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Case 4,000 falling apart, makes mockery of prosecution
by Gilad Zwick
May 26, 2021

…On the morning of Ben-Ari’s opening argument, I published an article that focused on the huge holes in the prosecution’s basic thesis that Netanyahu had asked for unusual coverage on the Walla news site in exchange for regulatory benefits for controlling shareowner of Bezeq – which owns Walla – Shaul Elovitch. Supposedly, this was a legal precedent – the first instance of media coverage comprising an element of charges of bribery against a politician. If you missed it, the word on which the case will survive or fail is “unusual” – whether the tradeoffs between Netanyahu and Elovitch were so unusual as to be criminal enough to be bribery. Amazingly, even before the evidentiary stage of the trial began, it was already known that the prosecution had not troubled itself to create any criteria that would determine a norm, deviation from which would cross into the area of criminality. READ MORE