As the official death toll in Gaza tops 45,000 and Israel’s wars throughout the Middle East continue, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in court for a long-awaited corruption trial, making him the country’s first sitting leader to face criminal charges. He is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate cases. For more on this extraordinary case, we speak with acclaimed filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose latest documentary The Bibi Files features leaked behind-the-scenes footage of police interrogations of Netanyahu, his wife and those accused of bribing him. The film has been banned in Israel, and Netanyahu even tried unsuccessfully to stop it from screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, but Gibney says it is being widely shared inside Israel through unofficial channels. “Strictly speaking, this is a film about corruption,” Gibney tells Democracy Now! “It starts with petty corruption — being bribed with gifts and cigars, champagne, jewelry — but then the ultimate corruption is how he’s tried to elude a reckoning for his misdeeds, and in so doing, he wraps himself in the mantle of prime minister and then wages endless war.”
