Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet approves proposal to sanction the country's oldest newspaper.

The scandal rocking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inner circle began with a headline in giant type announcing Hamas’s “horrifying” plans for Israeli hostages, and an exclusive story about a document “said to be” from the computer of the organization’s then-leader, Yahya Sinwar. The headline appeared in German but precisely fit Netanyahu’s domestic needs.

The date was September 6. Less than a week had passed since the corpses of six Israeli hostages, shot by their Hamas captors, were found in a tunnel in Gaza. Protesters filled Israeli streets night after night, calling for a hostage deal and expressing anger that Netanyahu had prevented an agreement that could have saved the six. Funerals for the murdered captives drew thousands of people.

All of which played into Hamas’s strategy. So said the supposed Sinwar document that Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, had obtained. The document called for exploiting “psychological pressure” on the families of Israeli hostages “so that public pressure on the enemy [Israeli] government increases.” Talks on a hostage deal, meanwhile, could be dragged out long enough for Hamas to rebuild its military, the paper’s paraphrase of the document said.

[Read: Israel’s PR-war pandemonium]

Israeli media quickly echoed the report. Netanyahu leaped on it. In his weekly statement to the media before the cabinet met, he said that Bild had revealed Hamas’s plan “to sow discord among us … to tear us apart from within … until Israel is defeated.” Most Israelis weren’t “falling into this Hamas trap,” he added. The protesters, by implication, were the tools of Israel’s enemy.

If publication of the Hamas document seemed too convenient for Netanyahu’s political purposes, that may be because it was. On Thursday, a Netanyahu spokesperson was indicted on the espionage charge of revealing classified information with the intent to damage state security, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. The spokesperson, arrested late last month, gave the contents of a top-secret document to the German paper in order to “slant the public conversation about the hostages” in Israel, the indictment says. Another close adviser of and spokesperson for the prime minister has been questioned by police and is named, but not charged, in the indictment, which states that the leak could compromise Israeli espionage “capabilities.” This means that the intelligence community could lose the long investment it has made in developing a source, as well as the information that source could provide in the future. A court ruling last week, partially lifting a gag order, said the leak may also have harmed efforts to free hostages.

As portrayed in those court documents, members of Netanyahu’s staff have shown themselves willing to pay an astonishing price for deflecting criticism of the prime minister’s war policy. Because of military secrecy and court gag orders, a full picture of the case has yet to emerge. But the indictment and other legal documents tell part of the story.

When the Bild article came out, it reportedly set off alarms in Israeli military intelligence, which realized that the story was based on a top-secret document leaked from within the army. But army sources told Israel media that the document came from a minor Hamas figure, not Sinwar, and did not mention a lack of interest in a hostage deal.

Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, investigated the leak and traced it to a noncommissioned officer, who had allegedly seen the document and decided that it needed to reach Netanyahu. The leaker’s motive is unknown, though it may be linked to a conspiratorial narrative, reportedly promoted by Netanyahu, that the military has hidden vital information from the prime minister since before the war. (In fact, the indictment says, more relevant and up-to-date intelligence had already been conveyed to the correct address.) The noncommissioned officer allegedly made contact with Eli Feldstein, a Netanyahu spokesperson, and sent him a photo of the document and a Hebrew translation via Telegram.

Feldstein is himself an ex-officer and a former spokesperson for the Israeli-military division in the West Bank. After leaving the army, he was a spokesperson for Israel’s far-right national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Last October, just after the war began, Netanyahu took on Feldstein as his point man for military correspondents.

In April, the indictment says, Feldstein failed a Shin Bet security-clearance check and was found unfit to handle highly classified material. Yet Netanyahu kept him on, and he regularly visited the Israeli military headquarters, in Tel Aviv.

The noncommissioned officer allegedly passed the document to Feldstein last June. Feldstein texted Jonathan Urich, a more senior spokesperson, that he was receiving “insane material” meant for the prime minister, the indictment says, citing the precise time of the WhatsApp message. Whether Urich or Feldstein actually passed the document on to Netanyahu is unstated in the indictment. But at the beginning of September, as streets in Israel filled with protesters, Feldstein allegedly sent a photograph of the material to an Israeli television journalist via Telegram. As required by law, the reporter checked with the military censor, who can block publication of information “nearly certain” to harm national security. The censor killed the item.

Undeterred by the censor’s ruling, Feldstein allegedly wrote to Urich to ask if he knew anyone outside Israel who could arrange publication of the classified material. Urich, the indictment says, connected him with Yisrael (Srulik) Einhorn, a campaign consultant who’d worked closely with Netanyahu and who was abroad. Via WhatsApp, Feldstein sent Einhorn the contents of the document and the censor’s message blocking publication. Einhorn contacted a Bild reporter, and the story of Hamas’s supposed strategy appeared. The legal documents don’t reveal how two key false details made it into the story: the supposed source of the document in Sinwar’s computer, and Hamas’s putative willingness to prolong the war.

In any case, Feldstein alerted the Israeli media, which could now report on what had appeared in a foreign outlet. The item got heavy play.

Urich, according to the indictment, texted Feldstein, surely referring to the prime minister: “The boss is pleased.”

The next day, Feldstein and Urich drafted Netanyahu’s statement quoting Bild. Everything had clicked—or so it seemed, until the arrests began.

This, at least, is the story the indictment tells. Its claims remain to be proved in court. And the indictment doesn’t say whether Netanyahu in fact knew in June that one of his aides had illegally received a document pilfered from military intelligence. It doesn’t say whether Netanyahu ordered the leak, or if he even knew in advance that the document would be leaked. Whether Netanyahu faces possible legal consequences, or only political fallout, remains to be seen.

Certainly, though, the case has rattled him. When it first broke, he denied that there had been any leaks from his office and that anyone from his bureau had been arrested or questioned. His tone has since changed. On Saturday night, via social media, Netanyahu released a nine-minute video clip in response to the indictment. The normally glib prime minister sounded angry and anxious. He claimed, falsely, that no other leaks have been investigated, and that the army was withholding crucial information from him. This investigation was a “witch hunt” aimed “not only at me, but at you, the huge public that voted for me,” he said. He said he knew Feldstein as a “patriot.”

Then he added, “But if they come … in the middle of the night and jail you, isolate you … threaten you with a life sentence … a person can break” and say anything. It was an apparent preemptive strike, should Feldstein testify against him.

[Read: Why Netanyahu fired his defense minister]

Meanwhile, the hostages remain in Gaza. Why Netanyahu has resisted reaching a hostage and cease-fire agreement is no more apparent now than it was in September. He has defined the goal of the war as “absolute victory” over Hamas militarily and ending its rule in Gaza. But he has evaded proposing an alternative for who would administer Gaza after the war. And his recently dismissed defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said earlier this month—in a meeting with families of hostages—that Israel has already “reached all [its] goals militarily.” So the mystery remains.

“The boss is satisfied, and my son is being abused in the tunnels” of Gaza, Einav Zangauker, whose son is a hostage, said in a video statement on social media after the Feldstein indictment was made public.

Maybe Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners want the war to continue, allowing Israel to renew its occupation and settlement of Gaza. Or maybe an end to the fighting would simply redouble public pressure for new elections, which Netanyahu would likely lose.

Here is where the hostage issue meets the leak affair: The security that matters most to Israel’s supposed “Mr. Security,” it seems, is his own.

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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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