Indyk is telling the truth about Netanyahu

"Frontline" is documentary television program distributed through the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. The program about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which was aired Tuesday, lasted close to two hours, without commercials.

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Netanyahu wasn’t interviewed on the show, and neither were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the two presidents he confronted. But a respectable group of American and Israeli supporting actors is interviewed on it. Most of them talk frankly, some express grief. The story they are telling is not a happy one.

A controversy broke out Wednesday following a comment made by Martin Indyk, who served as the American ambassador to Israel twice and as Obama's special envoy to the Middle East. I am presenting the quotes from the full transcript of the interview with Indyk, which was held about six months ago, on July 22, 2015. The interviewer was Jason M. Breslow.

Indyk spoke about a conversation held at during a Knesset ceremony on November 5, a day before slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's funeral. He attended the event as the American ambassador.

Netanyahu at Rabin's funeral. The incitement campaign he led until the murder was aimed at killing Rabin at the polling station, not at the square

"The first step was to bring his body from the hospital through a cortege up to the Knesset where he would lie in state. There was a big assembly of dignitaries and the diplomatic core and politicians and so on at the Knesset waiting for Rabin’s body to arrive, the coffin. And I remember Netanyahu saying to me: "Look, look at this. He’s a hero now, but if he had not been assassinated, I would have beaten him in the elections, and then he would have gone into history as a failed politician."

I'm going to take a risk and say something which will anger people in both camps. First of all, Indyk is telling the truth. He has no reason to fabricate this story after 20 years. Secondly, there is no reason to be shocked by what Netanyahu said. People say such things in people's ears, both during wedding ceremonies and during funerals.

Granted, it wasn't politically correct, but one can understand Netanyahu: He didn’t ask Yigal Amir to endorse him as prime minister, and didn’t want the US ambassador to think so. The incitement campaign he led until the murder was aimed at killing Rabin at the polling station, not at the square.

There is no way of knowing what would have happened has Rabin not been murdered. He may have won the elections; he may have lost. Netanyahu's optimism was based on reality.

In the interview, Indyk analyzes the political meaning of the remark: "Even at that moment of tremendous support, a tragic moment of support for Rabin, Netanyahu was thinking, well, politically he was on the ropes before he was assassinated. He exploited that and ran against Oslo in the (1996) elections and beat (Shimon) Peres, but he only beat him by something like a half of 1 percent. And so even then, it was a very close-run thing. So he didn’t have a very strong mandate to take apart Oslo, and indeed it wasn’t long before he was photographed at the White House shaking hands himself with Yasser Arafat.

"He was playing to his right-wing constituency. He has a very keen sense of his constituencies. That’s why he has been elected four times prime minister. He knows what excites them, and he knows what they fear...

"I think he was really playing to his constituency in a way that went over the line. You saw him do it again in the last minutes before this last election, and he came very close to the line over here. Certainly in the White House with an African American president, he crossed the line by saying that the Arabs were coming out in droves to vote. There is that part of him that plays with populist extremism on the right."

Back to the quote from 1995. After the program was broadcast in the US, Netanyahu issued a sweeping denial, saying it never happened. Such denials are common in politics, an almost legitimate move. When an embarrassing quote is published, people rush to deny it. But Netanyahu, like Netanyahu, launched a loud, groundless campaign.

His bureau distributed photos from the Mount Herzl funeral, a ceremony which was held a day after the Knesset conversation quoted by Indyk. Here's the evidence, the bureau claimed: Netanyahu is sitting next to Moshe Katsav, not Indyk. The Likud slammed Indyk in an official statement, and Yariv Levin, a government minister, described him as a liar from the Knesset podium.

This propaganda attack was built on the assumption that no journalist would bother reading the interview's transcript, although the full text can be found on the program's website. The main thing is to bombard social media and throw around the world "liar." In the end it works.

Netanyahu did the same thing to me on the eve of the elections, in response to an inconvenient article I published about him. At the time, he sent Benny Begin to lie and blast in a staged press conference. Since then, we haven't heard much about Begin: He has chosen the right to remain silent. This time he made Yariv Levin lie. Instead of checking the facts on his cell phone, a matter of two minutes and two fingers, Levin broke into a speech.

I wonder why Netanyahu needs this. After all, there is no quote from 20 years ago that can get him out of the house on Jerusalem's Balfour Street. Moreover, I wonder why his colleagues listen to him. Where is their self-respect, where is the embarrassment? They think that listening to him will promote them, that their loyalty will be cherished. They don’t understand that they come out of this affair looking like collaborators. Or worse, lapdogs.