Omri Assenheim’s current affairs program on KAN 11 is called Yihye Tov - Things Will Be Okay. What a misnomer.
After watching the nearly three hours of interviews, spread over three nights this week, of Assenheim’s interview with Eli Feldstein, a bit player in the Prime Minister’s Office during the turbulent year from October 2023 to October 2024, one could hardly walk away thinking that “things will be okay.”
Neither for the Prime Minister’s Office, nor for the country.
Because what Feldstein portrayed was an office where Chief of Staff Tzachi Braverman allegedly said he could block an IDF investigation, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu winked at circumventing the censor by releasing sensitive information to a foreign newspaper, and where officials close to Netanyahu were in the pay of Qatar and pushing favorable messages about that Hamas-supporting state during a time of war.
It wasn’t an accounting of a single bad decision, but of an environment where lines were blurred and manipulation of the public, via the press, ruled the day.
Some of the most damning revelations about what has become known as Qatargate came not from Feldstein’s interview but, rather, from reporting this week on i24, highlighting WhatsApp communications between top Netanyahu advisers discussing what they were doing on Qatar’s behalf.
Feldstein interview: Did Netanyahu’s office betray Israel?
Feldstein may have been only a bit player in the Prime Minister’s Office – handling media queries and advising Netanyahu on messaging – but he sat at the center of two scandals that have been percolating below the surface for months: the leak of a classified intelligence document to Bild, aimed at influencing the domestic debate over the hostages, and Qatargate, both of which faded before being revived this week by Assenheim’s program and the i24 revelations.
The combination has led to renewed calls for a thorough investigation, with former and wannabe future prime minister Naftali Bennett calling Qatargate the “greatest betrayal” in the state’s history.
This was a bigger betrayal, he said, than acts of treason by Mordechai Vanunu, who photographed Israel’s nuclear production capabilities in the 1980s, and the radical left-wing activist Udi Adiv, who in the early 1970s provided information on Israeli army bases and vulnerabilities to the Syrians.
Why? Because those engaged in Qatargate were not junior individuals, but “the most senior and strongest” people in Israel.
While that characterization might apply to Yonatan Urich, one of Netanyahu’s senior and most trusted advisers, using those adjectives to describe Feldstein is a stretch. Nevertheless, Feldstein was involved and sat in the Prime Minister’s Office, the junction where both scandals met.
These are not new stories. They have been circulating for months, sometimes loudly, sometimes beneath the surface. What Feldstein’s interview did was join them together and spotlight a larger question: what exactly was going on inside the Prime Minister’s Office during one of the most traumatic periods in Israel’s history?
Whatever conclusion one ultimately draws – whether both scandals were reckless media manipulation, systemic mismanagement, or something darker – the common denominator is some seriously flawed judgment inside what is arguably the most important office in the country.
And Assenheim, a veteran journalist, knows what he is doing and clearly understood the significance of the moment. KAN ran a full-court press promoting the Feldstein interview, as if it were David Frost interviewing Richard Nixon.
It wasn’t, but the interview was riveting – even without the dramatic string music in the background, the lingering close-ups on Feldstein’s face at emotional moments, his choking up at times, and the slow-motion images of doves fluttering on and off what looked like telephone wires.
The interviews held attention because they offered a rare first-person account by a person who was on the periphery of the prime minister’s inner circle for a brief time and was now spilling the beans – or some of the beans.
It gained even more emotional force because Feldstein framed the story as one of betrayal: by Netanyahu, whom he said he admired, and by Urich, the powerful adviser for whom Feldstein still professed affection, even as he accused Urich of abandoning him.
And, in Feldstein’s telling, abandonment is precisely what happened.
After his arrest in October 2024 for the Bild leak case, he spent a couple of weeks in Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) interrogation, followed by long weeks in police detention, expecting any day for someone from the Prime Minister’s Office to come to his rescue.
No one ever came.
Instead, the Prime Minister’s Office denied Feldstein ever worked for it. That denial was technically correct – in a Bill Clinton “I did not have sex with that woman” sort of way – but not really truthful. Because he did work in the Prime Minister’s Office, had contact with journalists, took instructions, and spoke with Urich throughout the day. He just wasn’t paid by it.
Why not? Because he did not get the upgraded security clearance needed to formally become one of Netanyahu’s spokesmen, a security clearance denied because – as Assenheim said – Feldstein was untruthful regarding the smoking of recreational drugs.
According to his account, Urich – who emerges in Feldstein’s telling as a shadowy fixer inside the Prime Minister’s Office – arranged for him to be paid not by the Israeli government, but by an Israeli businessman named Gil Berger. Berger, in turn, worked with an American Jewish lobbyist, Jay Footlik, who represented Qatari interests.
In short, Feldstein was not being paid by the Israeli government, but – indirectly and allegedly – by Qatar through layers of intermediaries.
WHEN ASKED if this unusual payment arrangement raised any red flags, Feldstein said that – at the time – it did not. And then, in an admission that made him very believable, he said that he was doing something he always wanted to do at the locus of power, and didn’t want to jeopardize it by asking too many questions.
He was getting paid. How and by whom was not of great concern. Feldstein admitted in the interview that this was a bad mistake, and things unraveled from there.
That very human impulse – to avoid questions that might cost access – did not remain a personal failing for long. It led to his being connected with Qatargate, a scandal more corrosive than the Bild leak, not necessarily because it is more criminal, but because it strikes at the heart of trust.
The i24 investigation revealed extensive WhatsApp correspondence involving Feldstein, Urich, and Yisrael (“Srulik”) Einhorn, a former strategic adviser to Netanyahu now living in Serbia – allegedly to avoid questioning in Israel – that suggested a coordinated effort to build up Qatar’s role as a mediator in the hostage negotiations, while disparaging Egypt’s involvement.
In these messages, Einhorn described the efforts at one point as “manufacturing reality.”
Some journalists rejected these pro-Qatar messages when pitched to them; others published modified versions of the same talking points. Either way, officials in the Prime Minister’s Office – allegedly on Qatar’s payroll – were circulating messages that served Doha’s interests.
WHAT COMES across in the Assenheim interviews is the portrait of an ambitious young man in a job he loved, intoxicated by proximity to power, wanting to please his bosses, and not asking hard questions when he should have. The picture Feldstein painted was of a prime minister whose instinct was to deflect responsibility from the get-go for October 7, a staff that reveled in manipulating the public and engineering reality, and an office where loyalty and friendship – a loyalty and friendship he felt toward them – went unreciprocated.
It’s a compelling story, made all the more dramatic by the background music and Assenheim’s fluttering doves.
But is it true? Compelling is not the same as true. Feldstein comes across as very believable, a naive young man from a haredi background who says he was used and then abandoned to the wolves by those he trusted. He chokes up, sheds tears, and elicits the viewer’s sympathy. But is it true?
Those he accuses of betrayal and misuse of power, from Braverman to Urich to Netanyahu, released statements in reaction to the story, essentially saying that Feldstein broke under the pressure of the interrogation and was now attempting to save himself.
The two cases are still ongoing, and Feldstein’s interview led to renewed calls for the Shin Bet to investigate thoroughly.
IF THE FACTS are still contested, the political fallout is not.
The opposition jumped all over the story, demanding answers and an investigation that includes questioning Netanyahu.
Through it all, aside from asserting at a press conference alongside his Greek and Cypriot counterparts that the story is “fake,” Netanyahu chose to remain silent. He didn’t mount a detailed rebuttal or any visible effort to seize the initiative.
It was into that vacuum that Bennett leaped, seeing an opportunity. His statement about the greatest betrayal in Israeli history triggered a response from the Prime Minister’s Office branding him an “arch-conman” and, alluding to the way he told his voters one thing and did the exact opposite following the 2021 election, charging that he is the last person who can discuss “betrayal.”
Yet, ironically, Bennett’s hyperbole did not emerge in isolation. Last month, Netanyahu himself reached for similar language when responding to the affair involving a leak allegedly authorized by then-military advocate-general Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, saying the footage leaked of alleged abuse by Israeli soldiers of detainees at Sde Teiman was “perhaps the most severe public relations attack the State of Israel has experienced since its establishment.”
What this shows is that in today’s political culture, every scandal is unprecedented, every breach existential, every opponent’s misstep framed as a national catastrophe.
This rhetorical inflation is not incidental. It is part of the same environment that produced both the Bild leak and Qatargate. In the Bild affair, the leak was aimed at framing the logjam in the hostage negotiations as part of Hamas’s strategy; in Qatargate, the effort was to frame Qatar as a constructive mediator rather than a problematic actor.
A common thread running through both – as well as Bennett’s talk of the “greatest betrayal” and Netanyahu’s invocation of a “severe public relations attack” – is that what matters less is reality itself, and more how events are framed. And in that environment, unfortunately, truth is often the casualty.