During the months Eli Feldstein worked as a communications adviser to Itamar Ben-Gvir, he was considered the sane member of the group. Next to Bentzi Gopstein, that is not particularly difficult. In the group’s internal messages, one repeatedly encounters Feldstein’s difficulty in containing the Ben-Gvir-style madness. Once, Ben-Gvir decided to hold a hearing for the commander of Ketziot Prison, who had casually remarked something along the lines of “Ben-Gvir doesn’t make the decisions.” He demanded the prison’s security-camera footage and held a humiliating hearing for the prison commander and the district commander. He went berserk and shouted, and at some point Feldstein could no longer take it and walked out of the room. Shortly afterward, he left his position.
When he arrived at Netanyahu’s office at the beginning of the war, he was mainly fascinated by the action, by the ability to throw out a sentence that would become a headline, and by being in the room while things were happening. In this respect, he was telling the truth when he described his motivations to Omri Assenheim on Kan 11. His account of leaking the document to Bild also makes sense and is consistent with the evidence in the case.
Is it common practice to pass information that is prohibited from publication in Israel to the foreign press? Not really. About a year ago, I spoke with the Shin Bet spokesperson’s office after the censor blocked an important story of mine. I told the spokesperson: You know this will come out abroad anyway, right? I do not remember what he answered, but a year later — it still had not come out.
To be fair, it should be noted that there have been and still are journalists in the Israeli media who, alongside their work in Israel, write for foreign publications. Sometimes a story is published abroad under their byline alongside foreign correspondents, including material that was prohibited from publication in Israel. At one point, such a passage appeared in a book by Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv concerning the bombing of the Syrian reactor. I asked the censor how this could be published in Israel in a Hebrew-language book. I was told that it was a passage Raviv, a foreign journalist, had published, and that in the next edition a distinction would be made between the authors.
So Feldstein could have felt that he was walking down a forbidden but common path. He saw the operation of leaking sensitive documents that was taking place in Netanyahu’s office. Many of the stories targeting the military that were published after October 7 — Feldstein once explained in a private conversation — originated in Netanyahu’s office. Against this background, he is right that the Shin Bet’s aggressive investigation of him was excessive.
Regarding “Qatargate,” however, Feldstein’s version is completely riddled with holes, and it is unclear why he agreed to give an interview about it in the first place. Perhaps he thought the correspondence between him and Einhorn, and the additional evidence showing that he knew very well that Qatari clients were involved in the story, that he was fabricating media stories, and that he was being compensated for it would not emerge.
Even a skilled communications adviser like him failed to take into account that he did not possess all the evidence, and that the other side — Yonatan Urich and Israel Einhorn — also had correspondence that could hurt him. The publication of the messages created an absurd situation in which he talks for hours about everything under the sun without being asked about facts that undermine his version.
The flood of new details in the affair does not change the overall picture: publicly, an unprecedented stench; legally, the matter remains complicated. There is no evidence that Netanyahu knew about the corruption. As for the other participants, there is still the hurdle of the definition of a “public official.” Is someone who receives his salary from Likud but is part of the prime minister’s inner circle a “public official”? In my view, that is an entirely surmountable hurdle, but there is no 100-percent certain answer.
If there is one point that has been sharpened, it is that proving harm to national security is not particularly complicated, as emerged from Judge Menachem Mizrahi’s remarks. There is no need to delve into the ambivalent question of whether Qatar is or is not an “enemy state.” The fabricated briefings against Egypt undoubtedly damage relations with a strategic ally and therefore directly harm national security.