Bibi, Bugs Bunny and prosecutorial persecution
The newly released sequel to “The Trial” is a must-watch for anyone doubting the deep-state attempt to bring down Israel’s democratically elected leader through lawfare.
By Ruthie Blum
JNS
Jul 18, 2025
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee arrived on Wednesday at the Tel Aviv District Court to observe the proceedings of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing trial. This particular act of solidarity with the Israeli prime minister followed a number of statements by President Donald Trump expressing outrage at the “politically motivated case.”
Trump went further, urging that the trial be canceled “immediately” or that Netanyahu be granted a pardon. As was to be anticipated, the very activists and pundits who’d spent years in cahoots with the Biden administration to “rescue Israel from Netanyahu” have been in a tizzy over what they consider inexcusable American intervention in Israel’s internal affairs.
The hypocrisy would be hilarious if it weren’t so egregious. Ditto for the fact that the hearing Huckabee had come to attend was suddenly deemed a closed-door session. So, the U.S. envoy and the rest of the viewing public were sent away.
It’s unclear whether the move was related to the presence of Huckabee, who was photographed clutching a Bugs Bunny doll as he greeted Netanyahu and Amir Ohana, the Speaker of the Knesset. This was more than an inside joke.
The stuffed cartoon character’s role in the trial has become widely known and rightly ridiculed, turning the prosecution into a laughing stock. For anyone unfamiliar with this element of the overall farce, a little recap is in order.
To illustrate Netanyahu’s longstanding and “corrupt” connection to Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan, prosecutors pointed to the 1996 purchase of the toy in question.
Apparently, Milchan was asked by Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, to buy a Bugs Bunny doll for the couple’s then-5-year-old son, Yair. According to the story on which the prime minister was grilled ad nauseam, Milchan schlepped around New York City in the rain to comply.
When the prime minister said he recalled something about a Bugs Bunny gift but was vague on the details, since the event happened nearly three decades ago, prosecutors accused him of possessing a selectively poor memory.
Later, Netanyahu would quip that he hadn’t realized the trial was about “Who Killed Roger Rabbit?” And his supporters dubbed the silly business “Bugs Bunny-gate.”
This is merely a taste of the travesty that Trump referred to on Truth Social as a “WITCH HUNT” against Bibi, who “deserves much better than this, and so does the State of Israel.” For a deeper dive into the deep-state persecution of Israel’s democratically elected leader, there’s a new Hebrew-language film with English subtitles that spells it out.
“The Trial: Part 2” is a sequel to the first documentary on the topic, released in October 2022—a month before the Knesset elections that resulted in the current, Netanyahu-led government.
Part 1 gives a run-down of the indictments—spurred by a 2015 hit job in the far-left newspaper Haaretz—with a focus on the bribery charge, the most serious of the three. The lesser two are fraud and breach of trust.
Part 2 shows how flimsy the bribery case is, since Bezeq shareholder Shaul Elovitch didn’t receive regulatory benefits from Bibi in exchange for puff-piece reportage by the news site Walla. Not only that.
Through interviews with legal eagles and other knowledgeable sources, it demonstrates that nobody involved in the attempt to criminalize Netanyahu thought that he would persist in proving his innocence. In other words, the lawyers preparing the cases didn’t imagine they’d end up before the bench.
The 19-minute video covers four categories of “facts.” The first is introduced with text reading, “Judges to prosecution: Drop the bribery charge. You don’t have enough evidence!”
Here, the narrator recounts, “At the end of June 2023, the judges inform the prosecutors that there are difficulties in establishing the bribery offense in the indictment. Against the background of these difficulties, it was suggested that the state consider dropping the bribery charge.”
“Such a statement by the judges is very, very dramatic,” says former State Attorney’s Office Adv. Rachel Wozner in the film. It’s especially notable, she adds, since this was still during the prosecution phase, before a single defense witness had taken the stand.
Furthermore, as is underscored by Knesset member Adv. Moshe Saada, another former official at the State Attorney’s Office, “Bribery is the main offense, which carries a 10-year prison sentence. Breach of trust is an offense they wouldn’t file an indictment for at all. It’s like a person has a murder case and is also charged with running a red light. Then the court comes and says, ‘Listen, there’s no murder in this case.’ Is a red light relevant to anyone [after that]?”
Nevertheless, the state prosecutors wouldn’t budge.
About this, renowned constitutional and criminal law professor Alan Dershowitz tells his interviewer: “I think the prosecution made a serious mistake and hurt their own credibility, both with the judges and with the public, by going forward in the face of a fairly clear statement by the judges that [they] don’t have the evidence to prosecute successfully in this case.”
The second “fact” exposed is titled, “Senior law enforcement officials: The working assumption was that Netanyahu would resign rather than fight.”
The narrator proceeds, “On June 28, 2023, former Israel Police Commissioner Roni Alsheikh said in an interview on Army Radio: “No one could have guessed that ultimately the prime minister would choose not to resign and fight from within the system.”
Professor Yuval Elbashan from the faculty of law at Ono Academic College in the Tel Aviv District calls the above “shocking.” He explains that what can be inferred from it is the assumption that the police and state prosecutors expected Netanyahu to give up the fight and make a plea bargain.
“This means,” he asserts, “that the case wasn’t built from the start for a courtroom confrontation, but as a pressure tool on the prime minister.”
The third “fact” opens with, “Two state witnesses sue the state: We were tortured and humiliated.”
The narrator goes on, “State witness Nir Hefetz sues the police and prosecution for more than 10 million shekels (about $3 million), allegedly due to his detention and interrogation conditions. State witness Shlomo Filber sues former senior officials in the police and prosecution for 10 million shekels due to events he allegedly experienced during detention and interrogations.”
Of this, Dershowitz opines, “In my 60 years in practicing criminal law in the United States and around the world, I’ve never seen such a messy case, where witnesses are suing the state and the prosecutors.”
The fourth “fact” is headlined, “The prosecution and the judges: Even in the midst of a multi-front war, Netanyahu’s testimony cannot be postponed.”
From the narrator: “The defense phase began on Dec. 10, 2024, after the defense’s requests to postpone the prime minister’s testimony by two and a half months were rejected by the prosecution and judges. Initially, three sessions per week were set, and later the judges agreed to hear the PM’s testimony two times a week.”
Dershowitz responds, “I don’t know of any other country that would require its leader during wartime to spend so much of his time in court on so frivolous a case. In the United States, this could never happen.”
It’s particularly striking that the people interviewed for the documentary are not all supporters of Netanyahu, to put it mildly. Take former Justice Minister Haim Ramon, for instance.
“I think Netanyahu should have resigned after Oct. 7, and I very much hope he won’t be prime minister after the [next] elections,” Ramon announces. “But at the ballot box. By the people. The public. Only the public will decide. But in Israel, there’s been no democracy for a long time. There’s only substantive democracy, which means there isn’t.”
Elbashan, no Bibi voter himself, concludes that this “is not just a criminal case against Benjamin Netanyahu. It has become the cornerstone of this thing called the ‘law-enforcement system.’”
Professor Moshe Cohen-Eliya, a leading expert in comparative constitutional law, sums it up nicely. “What we’re seeing here is a country in the throes of an ‘anybody but Bibi’ psychosis,” he notes.
And he didn’t even have to submit Bugs Bunny as Exhibit A to prove it.
