Netanyahu’s childhood friend breaks silence, warning of “ruined state” and personal obsessions

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  by Jasim Al-Azzawi

 

Nations do not always fall to invading armies. More often, they are fractured from within, hollowed out by leaders who confuse their own survival with the state’s fate. Israel has reached that precipice. The country is no longer governed in the public interest; it is being sacrificed to the needs of one man desperate to remain in power.

A recent Haaretz investigation, built around the testimony of Gabi Weicker — a childhood friend of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — exposes this collapse with rare devastating intimacy. It does not describe a strategist miscalculating or a leader overwhelmed by events. It portrays a man unravelling in real time, clinging to office as dear life, dragging the nation with him into deeper violence, global condemnation and isolation, and moral ruin.

Weicker is not a political enemy. He has no axe to grind. He is not a partisan rival. He knew Netanyahu before power distorted him, before suspicion hardened into obsession, before he caught the bacillus of corruption. Wicker’s testimony is devastating precisely because it is personal. What it reveals is not a policy breakdown. He drew a complete picture of total ethical disintegration.

Netanyahu, Weicker says, is no longer driven by ideology, security considerations, or even ambition in any recognisable sense. He is animated by himself. He wraps himself in patriotism, echoing Samuel Johnson’s famous jibe, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Every decision is calibrated to achieve one end: survival; one more term, one more crisis, and one more emergency engineered to postpone the reckoning. The state becomes armor, the military a hammer, and the dead an unfortunate abstraction.

Seen through this prism, the widening wars make bleak sense. Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and an ever-expanding geographical theatre of war. These are not strategic goals shaped by long-term national interest. They are sedatives, administered to a traumatised society to keep it locked in fear. At the same time, the clock on corruption trials and political collapse is pushed back to postpone the inevitable ignominious debacle. War ceases to be policy. It becomes a mechanism to delay the court’s final verdict. 

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Weicker speaks of a man in the clutches of deep panic: “hysterical,” reactive, swept along like debris in a flood. Netanyahu no longer directs events; he responds to them instinctively, defensively, paranoically. This is not the language of governance or the action of a world statesman. It is the language of pathology. Everyone is an enemy: judges, journalists, prosecutors, generals, and even former allies. The bunker siege mentality that once served him politically now governs the state itself. Survival demands destruction. The country must burn so the ruler may endure.

Power, in Weicker’s portrait, was never instrumental. It was existential. When Netanyahu briefly lost office, he did not lament policy derailment; he fixated on the loss of convoys, privilege, and the trappings of power that gave his existence life. Power was oxygen. Deprived of it, he suffocated. Restored to it, he consumed everything around him.

The moral decay extends far beyond politics into entitlement normalised as routine. The gifts, the cigars, the champagne, the indulgences financed by wealthy patrons were not excesses. They were symptoms. They were expected and taken for granted. A life of luxury incompatible with public service and limited salary, sustained through proximity to wealth and influence, and defended through impunity. Not an aberration, but an intrinsic feature. system.

Within this closed universe, Sara Netanyahu is not a marginal wife. She is a central player. Former aides have described her as the formidable gatekeeper; Weicker reveals the emotional claustrophobia of a household ruled by volatility, grievance, and fear. The private realm bleeds into the public. The state begins to resemble the home — unstable, individualised, and driven by impetuous impulses rather than customs and civility. 

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The most chilling revelation is not corruption, but erasure. Netanyahu’s eldest daughter, Noa, Weicker recounts, was rendered invisible — hidden away, excluded, erased to preserve domestic tranquillity. Meetings held in secret. Photographs withheld. A child disappeared. This is not simply personal cruelty. It is emblematic. Those who can erase their own flesh and blood can erase laws and entire populations.

Netanyahu’s diehard supporters dismiss his attitudes as temporary — a storm that will pass, a leader who will stabilise once danger recedes. Weicker offers a harsher truth. Ending Netanyahu’s rule, he argues, is not political competition. It is a mandatory act of national self-preservation. The fury of a betrayed friend becomes a warning: Israel is not being destroyed by its enemies, but by a leader who cannot abandon absolute control, domination, and total disregard for the rules of law.

This is not the tragedy of one man. Netanyahu’s actions resemble those of Shakespeare’s King Lear, who brought ruin to his kingdom. It is the tragedy of a system that rewards paranoia, shields corruption, sanctifies fear, and extols genocide. The institutions that were meant to restrain power have been hollowed out. Governance has been replaced by hostage-taking.

“An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes.” Says the famed Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu. They leave scorched landscapes and shattered trust. Netanyahu may still command armies and cameras. But his moral authority evaporated decades ago. Credibility is gone. International condemnation is cascading. Restraint has vanished.

What remains is a state haemorrhaging legitimacy, cohesion, and conscience, all in service of one man’s terror of accountability. And when fear governs, it always ends the same way, in ashes.'

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260120-netanyahus-childhood-friend-breaks-silence-warning-of-ruined-state-and-personal-obsessions/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPeBnRleHRuA2FlbQIxMABzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEey6vH7xCtBgjXWyEUK1UT_H4rCj6CNWGAaCuLHuC07XnaHRBaQ0aopIAvbl4_aem_eZcbLOLWJ6cJwGPSMUk9fw