Bringing up Bibi: Netanyahu testifies

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from THE Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

And I'm Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Have you got a master's degree or are you considering one? Well, listen up. For a surprisingly large fraction of people, they won't help your earning potential. By the numbers, it might even leave you worse off.

And stuck for a Christmas present. Can't decide how to relax over the holidays? Fear not. Our culture team recommends the best books of 2020.

But first, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a lot on his plate. He's waging an increasingly unpopular war in Gaza, which which drew thousands of anti government protesters onto the streets of Tel Aviv this weekend. And last month, he became the target of the International Criminal Court.

The world's top war crimes court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They're accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. A separate warrant.

Mr. Netanyahu has denied the ICC's charges, in his words, with disgust. But his legal problems don't stop there. At home, he's the subject of several criminal cases in which he also maintains his innocence. For years, Mr. Netanyahu's lawyers have worked to keep the embattled leader out of Israeli courts. But this morning, four and a half years after a trial against him began, he became the first witness for the defense.

I'm outside the Tel Aviv District Court where just a few minutes ago the session in which Netanyahu is supposed to take the stand for the first time began.

Anshul Pfeffer is our Israel correspondent.

What you are probably hearing now in the background is a not very large but very noisy group of supporters of Netanyahu who gathered earlier outside the courthouse and are calling this trial a witch hunt and demanding that it end and the prime minister be allowed to go back to running the country.

Right, let's wind back and get a reminder why he's in court at all.

So Netanyahu is trial in three cases which have been rolled into one. There are three charges of fraud and another charge of bribe taking. Case 1000 is the gifts case. Netanyahu is accused of illegally accepting very expensive gifts from wealthy benefactors. Case 2000 is the suspicion of him colluding with one of Israel's main media barons. And case 4000 is another case of collusion with the media baron. This is the one also where there's an accusation of bribes. And here Netanyahu is accused of trying to change various media regulations on behalf of a media owner in return for favorable coverage in that media's news organization. Obviously, Netanyahu has strenuously denied all the allegations from the start.

And this trial has already been going on for four years. Where are things? What's going on today and what's gone on up till now?

Well, the prosecution brought a long series of government officials, mainly former government officials, who testified to the way that Netanyahu allegedly intervened in press regulations. It brought staff of those rich people who claim that they were the conduits to bringing various expensive gifts to the Netanyahu family. And also journalists and executives in news organizations who testified in the way that Netanyahu allegedly interfered or people working on tried to interfere in their news coverage of him. Dozens and dozens of witnesses took the stand over the past three and a half years. And here we are just at the stage where the defense is beginning its presentation with the thorny owl's testimony.

And what's the nature of his defense that none of this happened, full stop, end of story?

Well, it's more a matter of interpretation and saying, I never gave any orders. And when people are saying that things were done on my behalf, I knew nothing about it. The bottom line is that Netanyahu claims that he is the victim of a witch hunt concocted by the prosecution with the help of the Israeli media. And all of this is a sham trial. We're not expecting to see today that much of interest. It'll probably be mainly grandstanding by Netanyahu's lawyers and by himself. He'll try and make an opening statement, very much a presentation that he prepared along with his lawyers that will be interesting. But the main show we can only expect in a few days when cross examination begins with the prosecution. Finally, Netanyahu will be there on the stand answering the questions of the prosecutors. And that really is the moment that he's been trying to avoid for so long.

And it sounds like the action outside the courtroom is Just as exciting.

Well, I'm basically sitting and talking to you right now on the edge of a three ring circus. There's the courtroom itself where Netanyahu's lawyer, as we speak, is making his opening statement. And that's the real story. But there are other rings to this. There's an outer ring within the Tel Aviv District courthouse where Israeli media and foreign media have set up their stands. There's all manners of spin going on there. And the third ring outside, all the protesters against Netanyahu are calling upon him to resign and blaming him for corrupting Israel and for all the terrible things that have happened during this war. So this case is being fought both on its merits in the courtroom, but it's being fought in the court of Israeli public opinion, and it's being fought within Israeli politics because you can't detach Netanyahu's own legal predicament from everything that's been happening in the last two years since he returned to office. And the attempt of his coalition to pass various types of legislation weakening the court system in Israel.

Well, exactly. We've talked on the show a lot about how his political moves have often been sort of tied to how this prosecution might actually go forward. Do you think this is the part where it starts to politically bite for him?

The politics of this has been playing out already for so many years. This is the reason why centrist parties in Israeli politics wouldn't join in Netanyahu government. It's the reason why Netanyahu found it so hard over four consecutive elections to form a coalition, ultimately losing power for 18 months and then two years ago finally managed to eke out a majority with many religious and far right parties. So the effect of Israeli politics we've already seen, whether it's going to continue to have an influence of politics very much depends on other matters and whether his coalition manages to pass legislation weakening the courts, whether he's held to account also for what's been happening in the next 14 months. There's a lot of public anger still at what are seen as Netanyahu's failures in preparing Israel for this war, in the priorities that he had the focus of his government and so on. So this is no longer the main focus of Israeli politics. It's now just one of many conflicts in which Netanyahu is fighting for his own political survival.

So as much as we have talked about this prosecution and Mr. Netanyahu has tried to avoid it, you're making it now sound like it's sort of, I don't know, the least of his problems.

When the charges were first put together by the then attorney General, this was seen as a massive crisis for Netanyahu, the first serving prime minister in Israeli history to have charges brought against him. It didn't seem as if he could survive it, but he brazened it out. He said, this is a witch hunt. I'm going to go to court and I'll prove that everything is wrong. We're already five years after that moment where you could have said this was the low point for Netanyahu. So now we're seeing the first time an Israeli prime minister is taking the stand as a defendant. But we've been in a long series of firsts in which Netanyahu has breaking all the norms of Israeli political life. Israelis are used to that by now. This process will take still many more months, probably more than a year, until the defence wraps up and the judges will take their time deliberating and delivering a verdict. Whatever the verdict will be, there'll be appeals. So this is going to roll on and on, and we'll be back here talking about many other issues regarding Netanyahu and Israel.

And it does seem like an almighty distraction for Israel's leader when the country is embroiled on so many fronts.

We're seeing here something which does seem absurd both to Netanyahu's supporters and his critics. Israel is in a very tense period, still fighting a war in Gaza. There's a ceasefire in Lebanon, which is only a couple of weeks old. There's everything that's been happening in Syria, where Israeli forces have advanced and taken positions within Syria, according to the Israeli version, to prepare for the possibility of rebels trying to use the chaos to attack Israel. Some people have said this is Netanyahu trying to deflect attention away from what's happening here in the court. And then there's the bigger picture of Israel's recent exchanges of fire with Iran. And at the same time, Netanyahu is here in court testifying about matters that happened as much as a decade ago. And it really doesn't make sense that a prime minister who has to deal with all those things is at the same time here in court. And some will see in this accountability the fact that the Israeli legal system is still capable of hauling a prime minister in front of judges and forcing him to give an account for his alleged misdeeds. Others will see this as too much power in the courts, and that's what Netanyahu supporters are claiming. Basically, all Israelis now think this is a crazy moment, anshul thanks very much.

For your time and enjoy the rest of the circus.

Thank you, Jason.

Some years ago, I did a Master's degree. I actually worked quite hard and I've even used some of the skills I learned during my working life. But research suggests that I was wasting my time. Though more and more of us are signing up for post grad courses to boost our career prospects, the returns may be somewhat elusive.

Postgraduate education, which for most people means master's degrees, have been one of the fastest growing areas of higher education for some years.

Mark Johnson is our education correspondent.

These days, 40% of Americans who have been to university have at least two degrees. As for Britain, its universities now award four postgraduate qualifications for every five undergraduate ones. But a growing body of data suggests that the financial returns to these degrees are very often quite puny.

So what do you mean by that?

The very simplest statistics suggest that people with master's degrees do very well. So in America, for example, people with masters earn about 20% more than people who have just a bachelor's. But in part, that just reflects the fact that the kind of people who do master's degrees are an unusually brainy bunch. They come from richer homes than other people, they tend to have gone to better unis for their first degrees, they tend to have got better marks. So in other words, they're exactly the kind of people who would have done well anyway, even without that extra year or two of study. So what we're getting better at doing now is comparing the fortunes of individuals who are otherwise similar. And when you do that, a big chunk of the financial returns from a master's degree disappear. So one guess is that In America, some 40% of master's courses offer no financial return or leave students worse off than they would have been once you account for costs and you consider what these people might have gone on to earn anyway. And Britain actually has even more comprehensive data and findings there are in fact, somewhat gloomier. They suggest that a master's degree on average has no effect on earnings by the time the graduates are 35 years old.

So you're telling me my master's was a complete waste of time? Thank you. What's going on here? Why is that?

Well, there's a kind of educational arms race going on here. So lots of people worry that now that seemingly everyone goes to university, they're going to find it harder to get a job or to keep their jobs unless they have an advanced degree. And this sense of insecurity, this fear of missing out, means a lot of people are actually not making the best decisions. But I think government policies also have not been helping students to get good value. America's government, for example, has no limit on what it will lend students to who want to do postgraduate degrees. That kind of blank check has actually encouraged universities to raise fees for postgraduate education, in some cases obliterating any financial return that students might have made. Britain's bungled too, but in a slightly different way. So for a decade, universities there have been mostly forbidden by the government from raising fees for undergraduates, the core market, even though inflation has increased universities costs by a third. So having limits on this core business of educating 18 year olds means that universities in Britain have had great incentive to create many more postgraduate programs, many of them of dubious quality, to help them make up for that shortfall.

And what you're saying is it actually saddles students with debts in the longer term and they don't get anything in return?

In some cases, yes, that's what's happening. Let's bear in mind also that returns to master's degrees vary widely by subject and by institution. So the American data, for example, suggest that masters in computer science are an extraordinarily good investment. Meanwhile, the data from Britain suggests that if you do a master's in something like English or history or politics, you can actually expect your earnings to decline relative to peers who leave university having done the same subject, but just for an undergraduate degree. But, yes, there's lots of very bad deals out there, and I think in America especially, the taxpayer ends up having to cover a chunk of money that gets lost in this way. So in America, half of all the money the government lends to students now each year is spent on postgraduate education, not on undergraduate education. And as loan repayment and forgiveness schemes get ever more generous, a big chunk of that money is not going to be repaid.

As you say, universities rely on offering master's programmes partly as a way to fill their coffers, particularly when, in some cases, domestic demand for student places is flat or declining. So what's the answer? I mean, how do you deter ambitious students and say, no, not worth it?

Well, I think governments ought to step back from policies that have been distorting things. So in America, that means tightening up somewhat the criteria for federal student loans. In Britain, it means rethinking this policy of effectively reducing the funding that unis have been getting for this core business of educating 18 year olds. But second, I think students need data from the government to help them make better choices. There's a big difference in the amount the different unis charge, even for very similar courses. But actually people who go shopping for a post grad degree have to make do with much less data on things like dropout rates or likely future earnings than people who are applying for their first degrees. And governments could do quite a lot to change that.

So the answer is really just more transparency.

Yeah, there's some progress towards this in America. So under rules passed by the Biden administration last year, graduate schools may soon be required to warn applicants before they sign up for courses that have low wages and high debts as the likely result of them. Some people think this is quite weak beer as a reform, that these notifications are going to be pretty easy to ignore. But. Well, I think this is progress nonetheless. You know, I think Donald Trump should make sure that some of these kinds of changes come into effect and I think other countries ought to take note.

Mark, thank you so much.

Thank you.

There have been some fantastic books published this year and it's not too late to read the best ones. Our crack team of book lovers here at the Economist have got you covered. They've been turning the pages to find out what's good and what's great in the literary slate of 2024. So we let our culture team pass the mic around for their hot takes on the must reads of the past 12 months.

I'm Rachel Lloyd, the deputy culture editor. My pick is Pamela Churchill. Harriman's Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power by Sonja Purnell. Kingmaker is a biography of Pamela Churchill. She was the daughter in law of Winston Churchill and she got married to his son Randolph during the war. However, Randolph was posted abroad. He was a bit of an oaf. And so Winston deployed Pamela to a different kind of war work. She seduced high profile Americans in a bid to get them to join the war effort. And she basically became a useful conduit of information between the Americans and the Brits and is credited as the most powerful courtesan in history. This book tells her story and it charts her whole life. So the war years are actually a small part of it, though they are a romp to read. It also covers her later marriages and affairs and it looks at her second act, which was the grandee of the Democratic Party and she was thanked by Bill Clinton for helping him win the White House. He repaid her by making her ambassador to France. Now I'm passing the mic to my colleague John in New York, who loves a great novel.

Thanks, Rachel. I'm John Fassman, the economist's senior culture correspondent and former host of the Intelligence. For my book of the year, I picked Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction Lives of the 20th Century novel. This is an essential and really thrilling book for anyone who loves reading, Edwin Frank argues in it correctly, I think, that the novel was central to Anglophone cultural life in the 20th century, and using historical overview and close reading, he traces how the novel evolved as a form over the course of that bloody and disruptive hundred years. Now he cheats a bit and starts in the 1860s with Dostoevsky, because he argues that Notes From Underground, with its plaintive, insistent narrator, its jumbled structure, and its lack of a comforting resolution, set the tone for the century to come. And then he ends with W.G. sebold, German writer who died in, I think, 2001, whose mixing of text and image on the page, Frank argues, prefigures our online century. And in between those two, he lingers over books by Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, and a couple dozen others, and he outlines how each of them tried to reflect and process the world's ruptures in their fiction. Now every reader will be outraged by at least one of his choices and more of his omissions, but really part of the pleasure of reading a book like this is arguing with it. So I would suggest you read it yourself. Give it to every serious reader in your life so you can all argue with each other too. Now I'm going to pass the mic to the person who assigned me to review this book.

John, that's a great book, but I've got a different one. I'm Alexandra Sewich Bass, the Economist culture editor, and my pick for the best book of 2024 is Mania, which is a novel by Lionel Shriver. In this novel, Cancel culture has gone to even greater extremes. In America, it is forbidden to say the word stupid and any of its synonyms. The New York Times crossword puzzle has been halted. It's no longer allowed to run IQ tests or have spelling bees. And the protagonist in this novel, Pearson Converse, is a literature professor who does not like the current state of affairs, nor do her children. And it's a really fascinating tale of resistance and compromise in a society that looks like our own in some ways but is in of course, other ways, radically different. What's fun about the book is that it takes on serious subjects, but it does so in a somewhat light hearted and often deeply and darkly funny way. So it made me laugh, and I think it will make you laugh too. And now I'M passing the mic to someone who has a gripping nonfiction book recommendation.

Thanks, Alexandra. I'm Kaylin Talbot, a culture researcher and correspondent at the Economist, and I've selected the Forbidden Garden by Simon Parkin, a British journalist. So the story set in Leningrad in 1941-44, where there was a siege on the city by Nazi forces lasting for nearly 900 days. And there was severe starvation. You know, people were eating leather belts and face cream, anything that had calories that was edible. 750,000 people died, a third of the pre war population. But in the middle of the city, there was this huge store of potential food in the form of a seed bank. So if planted, it could have fed the entirety of the city, all of Russia, elsewhere besides. But if they didn't eat the seeds, they could be used in the future to engineer super crops, high yielding, disease resistant varieties that could be used to feed future generations. The botanists understood the dilemma that they faced and this is the tale of their decision. And that's the book that I would recommend. And I'm passing the mic back to you, Rosie.

And for a complete reading list of everything you should have read in 2024, click on the link in the show notes or head to our website.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.