As it turns out, the December 11 release of The Bibi Files is fateful since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu took the witness stand on Tuesday, December 10, for the first time in his trial on corruption charges. This must-see documentary which features leaked footage of the police interrogations of Netanyahu and other witnesses, co-produced by Alex Gibney, is one of the best, most powerful nonfiction films that I have seen in years.
On November 21, the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest “for crimes against humanity and war crimes.” The Bibi Files makes a compelling case that Israel has committed atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Onscreen Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker asserts, “I’m sure he’s afraid he’ll go to jail.” The film insists that avoiding incarceration is driving Netanyahu’s devastating response to the brutal attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
As one of the many interviewees in The Bibi Files contends: “Everything he’s done in the past five years is focused on that [prison] gate slamming at his back.” In another segment, Israeli author Nimrod Novik claims “the war became another instrument for Netanyahu to stay in power.”
The opening montage shows the horrific carnage wrought by war in Gaza, where more than 44,000 people have died with countless more maimed, as a Palestinian woman screams in Arabic her outrage at Netanyahu. It then cuts to scenes of domestic mass protests against the prime minister’s Machiavellian maneuvers to reform the Supreme Court in 2023, as a young Israeli female demonstrator states “Forever war helps him remain prime minister.”
The star witness in The Bibi Files may be the documentary’s eponymous suspect himself, but this never-before-publicly-seen leaked footage also includes the videotaped police questioning of Netanyahu’s wife Sara and his son Yair (both of whom visited with Donald Trump—another leader dogged by criminal convictions and indictments—at Mar-a-Lago on December 1). The film also includes other witnesses for the prosecution: telecom mogul Shaul Elovitch; two-time Oscar nominated Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and his employees, including a housekeeper; and Netanyahu’s childhood friend Uzi Beller.
In addition to interrogation tapes, The Bibi Files incorporates interviews, some shot for this documentary, others from sources such as 60 Minutes. Drucker, who is interviewed throughout the film, is a co-producer of the film and political analyst for Israeli television’s Channel 13. He has been hot on Netanyahu’s trail for years, and has been sued three times by Bibi.
The Bibi Files exposes Netanyahu’s alleged pay-for-play, quid-pro-quo corrupt business practices. When Elovitch got in over his head with loans, according to the film, Netanyahu helped arrange government financing for the indebted telecommunications magnate. In exchange, the prime minister received extremely favorable treatment from the widely viewed Walla website, which Elovitch owned.
Drucker also purports that Bibi pulled strings to extend a ten-year tax law that would benefit Milchan, the movie mogul. Former Finance Minister Yair Lapid states onscreen that this was “the only tax regulation Netanyahu ever approached me about.”
In interviews and interrogation scenes, witnesses divulge that Bibi’s favoritism was in exchange for lavish gifts including a $450,000 diamond bracelet, cigars costing more than $1,000 per box, and expensive bottles of champagne. As Drucker says in the film, the Netanyahus “love the good life.”
In 115-minutes, The Bibi Files covers a lot of territory. The film cogently chronicles Netanyahu’s Faustian pact with Israel’s far right, and how his personal interests—staying in power and out of jail—coincide with those of the “messianic expansionists” led by extremist cabinet members.
It also explores Bibi’s shady arrangements to arm and finance Hamas in Gaza for the purpose of keeping the occupied residents divided by preventing Hamas and the Palestinian Authority from uniting. The film contends that this policy led to the biggest security breakdown in Israeli history, enabling Hamas to plan and carry out the October 7 invasion right under the nose of Netanyahu, who had been called “Mr. Security.”
The interrogation tapes and interviews are skillfully interwoven with montages of the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations in Israel, the “beeper bombings” in Lebanon, and above all, the murderous mayhem wreaked upon the besieged Palestinians. In the West Bank, a Palestinian paramedic in an ambulance heartbreakingly laments “every imaginable atrocity under Gvir, Smotrich and Netanyahu,” including settlers burning down homes and the fatal shooting of his ambulance driver.
The documentary’s coproducer, Gibney, won the Best Documentary Oscar for 2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side about U.S. torture and interrogation techniques in Afghanistan. The film’s co-producer and director Alexis Bloom has been nominated for three Emmy Awards, including for 2018’s Roger Ailes exposé Divide and Conquer. Bloom also produced Gibney’s 2013 We Steal Secrets, The Story of Wikileaks.
The case and evidence laid out in The Bibi Files seems irrefutable and insurmountable. Its inescapable conclusion is cinematically encapsulated with a shadow of Netanyahu’s profile superimposed over aerial footage of Gaza’s bombed out buildings, reduced to rubble.
The Bibi Files opens in select New York City theaters on December 11, and is also available to view for a fee at www.jolt.film.