CSI: Jerusalem — A Former NYC Detective Looks at the Netanyahu Case

By Dr. Shmuel Legesse: Upcoming Author of Moral Diplomacy for a Broken World: Inspired by the Vision of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

When you’ve worked as an investigator for the New York City Supreme Court, you learn two things. First, coffee is your closest friend. Second, politics sometimes wears a judge’s robe. So when I look at the endless legal soap opera surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, my professional instinct whispers: this isn’t justice it’s theater.

I speak not as a politician but as an Ethiopian-Israeli Jew who spent decades in America learning and observing law, education, and democracy up close. I earned my doctorate from a university in New York and served more than twenty years in the city’s court system as an investigator/detective. There we followed one golden rule: if you investigate a man for thirty years and still can’t prove a crime, maybe the problem isn’t the suspect.

For nearly three decades, prosecutors and pundits have chased Netanyahu through a maze of leaks, witnesses, and scandals with more sequels than Fast and Furious. Each “bombshell” has fizzled into dust. What remains is a pattern that looks less like democracy and more like bureaucracy’s version of revenge.

A PRIME MINISTER WITH THE FLU AND A COURT DATE

Take last Sukkot. Former President Donald Trump had just landed in Israel, waving his “Deal of the Century” like a souvenir brochure. The Knesset was buzzing, and the prime minister was under the weather—a stubborn flu, nothing political about it yet he stood through every handshake and photo op. The next morning, while most of us were still digesting holiday kugel, Netanyahu was not boarding a flight to the UAE to meet Abraham Accords partners alongside Trump; he was shuffling, tissues in pocket, to court to face a 30-year-old case. I’ve seen inconvenient court dates before, but that was a new level of dedication—or absurdity.

PRIDE WITHOUT BLINDNESS

Let me be clear: I’m an openly proud, reasonable Zionist and unapologetically right-wing. Out of love for Zion and Jerusalem, I left a respected investigator/detective position with the New York Supreme Court and made Aliyah to Israel in August 2023. I admire Netanyahu—the statesman, strategist, and survivor. Yet admiration doesn’t mean blindness.

As an Ethiopian Jew, I know that no aliyah wave from my community arrived under his current government and that many Ethiopian doctors and Ph.D.s including myself still find ourselves cleaning Israel’s Foreign Ministry offices instead of representing the country at the UN, EU, AU, or in South Africa. That door is currently closed and that hurts.

But being right-wing doesn’t mean being blind. It means being honest about both strengths and flaws. And here’s the truth: I don’t like the idea of one person leading any country for more than ten years. Power should rotate; democracy needs oxygen. Yet Israel’s democracy—vibrant, noisy, imperfect—made it possible for one man to stay because millions of voters, again and again, decided he was still the best option. That, in itself, is democracy.

A MAN WHO CAN TALK TO BIDEN AND TRUMP

As a diplomatic expert and educator, I can’t ignore Netanyahu’s rare skill. Very few leaders can maintain genuine friendship with both President Joe Biden (Democrat) and President Donald Trump (Republican)—men who can barely agree on what day it is. That takes agility, patience, and a Ph.D. in political acrobatics.

Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel deepened ties with the Arab world, built the Abraham Accords, strengthened technology alliances, and quietly secured the kind of U.S. defense cooperation that lets our pilots sleep at night. When Washington authorizes specialized tools capable of reaching deep into Iran’s nuclear network, that’s not luck; it’s trust—the kind forged by decades of diplomatic craftsmanship.

And yet, instead of gratitude, Israel’s legal and media elites seem obsessed with punishing him for being effective. The system that preaches equality before the law now behaves like a partisan referee who blows the whistle only when the right-wing team scores.

From a professional standpoint, the signs of bias glow brighter than a Times Square billboard. Selective leaks. Manipulated evidence. Witnesses pressured like overcooked pasta. Prosecutors dining with journalists. These are not hallmarks of justice; they’re symptoms of institutional vanity. Netanyahu didn’t request a pardon because he’s guilty. He asked because he’s weary of being democracy’s most permanent suspect. After thirty years of nothingburgers, perhaps it’s time to investigate the investigators.

When a chief justice can appoint himself without consequence, when senior legal officials can throw their phones into the Mediterranean to erase evidence, and when a fabricated video like the Sde Teiman “blood libel” goes viral while truth stays offline the problem isn’t one politician. It’s a system that has lost its moral GPS. The same activists who chant “rule of law” every weekend suddenly lose their voices when their own allies break it. Silence has become the national background music. But Israelis are waking up, and once an awakening begins, it doesn’t go back to sleep.

As I wrote recently in The Jerusalem Post, the criminalization of Netanyahu has turned into a mirror reflecting Israel’s internal struggle: whether we remain a democracy of voters or morph into a technocracy of unelected clerks who think ballots are optional when they dislike the outcome. Despite all the court noise, most Israelis still tilt right. They argue it’s our national sport but they agree that Israel must stay both democratic and unapologetically Jewish. That conviction will outlast any headline.

To my fellow right-wingers I say: stay united but stay humble. To leaders like Honorable Former Prime Minster Naftali Bennett, I say: keep campaigning in the sunlight, not the courtroom. You have a bright future—perhaps even as our next prime minister. But if you truly wish to serve, win by votes, not verdicts.

LESSONS FROM A NEW YORK INVESTIGATOR/ DETECTICE

In my career I learned that truth is stubborn. Fabricated evidence eventually collapses, frightened witnesses eventually tell the truth, and biased systems eventually trip over their own arrogance. Justice walks slowly, but she never walks backward.

That’s what is happening in Israel. The thirty-year pursuit of Netanyahu has revealed not his corruption but the corruption of those who tried to destroy him. The justice system that set out to put him on trial has accidentally put itself there instead. And now the jury the Israeli public is deliberating.

THE FINAL VERDICT

You may love Netanyahu or wish for his retirement. You may vote Likud or Labor, right or left, kippah or bareheaded. But democracy means leaders are replaced by ballots, not by bureaucrats. The gavel is not a vote. The courtroom is not a campaign office.

As a proud Zionist, an Ethiopian-Israeli, and a believer in both Torah and democracy, I stand with whoever protects Israel’s unity and security. Netanyahu has done that for decades. When his time ends, it should be because the people said so not because prosecutors needed a headline. Justice must never become a hobby for politicians in robes. After thirty years of the same case, perhaps it’s time the judges took a recess and the voters had the final word.

That, from one former investigator to another nation of detectives, is the verdict.