Last week seems to have raised a larger than usual number of wacky news items. On Monday there was the visit of the president of the Paraguayan House of Representatives, Raul Latura, to the Tel Aviv District Court, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was giving evidence in his trial.
During the visit, which interrupted the court proceedings, Latura used the opportunity to express his admiration for Netanyahu as “one of the important leaders of the free world” and declared that Knesset Speaker Amir Oahana, who had organized the impromptu visit to the court in cahoots with Netanyahu, had told him “how unfair this trial is.”
According to the Paraguayan ambassador to Israel, Alejandro Rubin, in reply to a letter of protest by Labor MK Rabbi Gilad Kariv, the court visit was not part of Latura’s official itinerary, so it could not be viewed as an official Paraguayan intervention in Israel’s internal affairs.
The absurdity of the event is that even though Paraguay voted in favor of the partition plan for Palestine back in 1947 and briefly even moved its embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, it is a relatively small and unimportant landlocked state in South America, with a population of just over 7 million. What Netanyahu and Ohana thought would be gained from the episode, except for mockery, is not clear.
Another nonsensical news item was the confrontation between Deputy Speaker Eliyahu Revivo (Likud) and MK Tally Gotliv (Likud) in the Knesset plenum last Wednesday. Revivo, who was chairing the session, called Gotliv to order for talking loudly with her back turned to him while the plenum was voting on a law about the water and sewage corporations.
He suggested that she was trying to garner “likes” (toward the approaching Likud primaries) and told her to “please calm down.” Gotliv jumped back at him, saying, “You shall not talk to me as if I were a bitch. You misogynist, I am not your bitch!” and was then thrown out of the plenum. This shameful scene was broadcast repeatedly on all the TV channels (including channel 14) as we all lit the fourth Hanukkah candle.
From Knesset drama to Bardugo interview
Compared to these rather shameful items, a somewhat unusual interview between Roni Kuban from Channel 11 and media personality and advisor to Netanyahu, Yaakov Bardugo, carried out on December 13, was a fascinating example of open and highly informative journalism, involving two ideological rivals.
Of course, we did not see and hear over half of the two-hour interview and do not know what was left out. Both men occasionally expressed discomfort and nervousness, but both had moments when they clearly spoke from the bottom of their hearts.
Kuban, who very rarely speaks without consulting his cards, had many minutes of facing the cameras without them, while Bardugo, who is considered a highly calculated and manipulative person, had long moments that smacked of sincerity.
When Kuban attacked Bardugo to the effect that a journalist cannot both report and give commentary on the prime minister’s actions and act as an advisor to him, Bardugo denied – as he always does – that he is a journalist. “I am a media man,” he added, and in the final reckoning, “you, with the backing of the NIS 800 million of the Broadcasting Corporation, are much less effective than I am on a non-public channel.”
Kuban accused Bardugo of exemplifying the trio of capital-government-newspaper (Hon Shilton Iton), and being the parent of fake news in Israel. Bardugo replied that the media in Israel – mainstream and Channel 14 alike – does not report the truth. He did not deny that channel 14 is extreme in its positions and admitted he does not like everything that is said on it, but he justified this extremism by the need to find a balance vis-à-vis the mainstream media.
He views balance between extremes to be a basic Jewish principle and quoted a religious source to that effect.
When Kuban confronted Bardugo with the fact that three Likud ministers – Justice Minister Yariv Levin, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, and Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar – had declared that he had threatened and blackmailed them, the unflappable Bardugo suggested that they should “rummage through their own deeds.”
With regard to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, he admitted that he is “not my cup of tea” since he (Bardugo) has a more liberal approach than Ben-Gvir, but that they are on good working terms.
Kuban took Bardugo back to the “hot tape affair” of 1993, when, during the primaries for the Likud leadership, someone reported that a tape existed in which Netanyahu was seen with a woman who was not his wife. Netanyahu admitted at the time that he had been unfaithful to his wife and announced that “one man, surrounded by a group of criminals,” was blackmailing him with a sex tape to drop out of the race.
The man Netanyahu was referring to was MK David Levi, who was also running in the primaries. Bardugo, who worked with Levi at the time, was marked as one of the “group of criminals” the prime minister was referring to. It finally transpired that there was no incriminating tape, and Netanyahu apologized to Levi.
He never apologized to Bardugo, and the subject was never raised between them, but according to Bardugo, he did offer him a ministerial post in his current government – that of Communications Minister.
However, what was most interesting about the interview was that Bardugo presented a clear analysis of how he views left-right relations in Israel. He admitted that today the Left is feeling the pain of losing its elitist status but denied that this is accompanied by hatred from the Right.
On the other hand, he accused the Left of actively hating the Right and discriminating against those who are of oriental origin, though he admitted that he personally had never been blocked because of his Moroccan origins.
While I disagree with this analysis, I cannot deny that Bardugo sounded sincere in what he said, and Kuban listened quietly, without interrupting him. It all seemed to be the right way of carrying out a civilized, even if sometimes emotional, interview between an interviewer and interviewee who are ideological rivals – a very rare but fascinating experience these days. May there be more of them.
The writer has written journalistic and academic articles, as well as several books, on international relations, Zionism, Israeli politics, and parliamentarism. In the years 1994-2010, she worked in the Knesset Library and the Knesset Research and Information Center.