Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 1 October

The Bibi Files (Bloom, 2024)

With all of the recent news com­ing out of the Middle East — Aotearoa New Zealand refus­ing to recog­nise a Palestinian state and Trump’s 20-point Gaza “peace” plan that some­how involved Tony Blair — I thought it might be help­ful to under­stand how we got here, at least the very recent con­text for how we got here.

Back in December I reviewed The Bibi Files for a quick sur­vey of recent doc­u­ment­ar­ies that also included the dev­ast­at­ing Sugarcane, about the abuse of hun­dreds of Native American chil­dren by the Catholic Brothers who were sup­posed to look after them, and Faye, about the bipolar world of Oscar-winning act­ress Faye Dunaway:

Another troub­ling real­isa­tion in a week of them was see­ing the case made that the deaths of tens of thou­sands of people in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and now Syria, can be traced back to one man’s taste for expens­ive cigars (and his wife’s pref­er­ence for the finest champagne).

In The Bibi Files, leaked Israeli police inter­rog­a­tion videos show how close Benjamin Netanyahu came to being pro­sec­uted for the most pro­sa­ic of cor­rup­tion charges before he saved his polit­ic­al career by form­ing a coali­tion with the worst of Israel’s right wing polit­ic­al move­ments and get­ting into an end­less war of expan­sion that is now being fought on three fronts.

Actually, the cigars and the cham­pagne were only the begin­ning of the story, even if they alone would have meant years in pris­on if the case had been con­cluded in time. As Israel’s longest serving prime min­is­ter, Netanyahu had an inflated idea of his own super­star­dom as well as a per­se­cu­tion com­plex about the media and oppos­i­tion. Some of the foot­age revealed in The Bibi Files is jaw drop­ping in its hubris.

The defin­ing char­ac­ter­ist­ic of right wing polit­ics in this shady world in which we find ourselves is shame­less­ness. Trump has taught these people to nev­er admit defeat, nev­er show weak­ness. And we have no effect­ive tac­tics to counter them.

Essential view­ing if you want to under­stand the unfold­ing tragedy of Gaza.

Where to watch The Bibi Files

Aotearoa: Streaming on DocPlay or digit­al rent­al from AroVision

Australia: Streaming on FoxtelNow or DocPlay

Canada: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Ireland: Not cur­rently avail­able online

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Digital rent­al from Jolt

UK: Digital rental