Ari Harow’s story: How a dream became a nightmare – exclusive

A week of celebration quickly turned into a nightmare.

It was December 2015, and Ari Harow, who had been one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top aides for around a decade, was looking forward to attending his daughter’s bat mitzvah and various pre-bat mitzvah activities – until he was arrested by the Israel Police.

After being interrogated, he was put under house arrest for five days during the bat mitzvah week, being released just in time to attend the bat mitzvah itself.

The nightmare came back again in July 2016, when the police waited for him in ambush at Ben-Gurion Airport following two consecutive red-eye flights back “home” to Israel from a routine business trip, arresting him without letting him return to his nearby house in Modi’in.

This time, they interrogated him for about 14 hours. Around August 2017, they would lean on him hard to become a state’s witness against his former boss and mentor Netanyahu in Cases 1000 and 2000, the Illegal Gifts Affair and the Yediot Aharonot-Yisrael Hayom Attempted Media Bribery Affair.

The above and what follows is compiled from years of reporting, a variety of people interviewed (some of whom must still remain anonymous), media interviews and an extensive review of many different testimonies and trial-related documents, including Harow’s testimony on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

This is not an attempt to tell the comprehensive story of what has happened to Harow that is evenhanded to both sides. Anti-Harow leaks to the media have been rampant since 2015. This is a first opportunity, now that many things have come out in court, to tell Harow’s side of the story.

The American-Israeli had made aliyah from Los Angeles with his family at age 12. He would later serve in the IDF’s Golani Brigade and then first worked for Netanyahu as a diaspora affairs adviser in 2002. Later, he spent several years working as a key Netanyahu fundraiser, running American Friends of the Likud in the US.

By 2008, Harow was back in Israel, running Netanyahu’s inner bureau, which he continued to do when his boss returned to the premiership in 2009 and until 2010 when he left public service.

In 2010, Harow founded 3H Global, an international government-relations firm based in Israel. According to the company’s website, the firm was founded to help governments, NGOs and businesses, utilizing Harow’s unique professional experience and connections to maneuver and succeed at “the highest levels of government, community and philanthropy in order to help achieve this goal.”

A tough choice came in 2014, when Harow was doing very well in the private sector, but Netanyahu called on him to drop that lucrative business to return again to “serve the flag.”

When Harow was appointed Netanyahu’s chief of staff, he gave up control of the company to his brother, Josh Harow, who served as its chief financial officer.

His return in 2014 also placed him as the second-most senior political official in the Prime Minister’s Office, only under the director-general. Eventually, he became one of the prime minister’s co-campaign chairmen in his successful 2015 reelection campaign.

Despite this list of accomplishments, Harow was a rare inner figure of Netanyahu’s circle who managed to mostly avoid the spotlight. Harow was “the kind of person that you can rest easy knowing he is in charge, a man with no ego and the last person you would think would get in trouble with the law,” a senior PMO official previously told The Jerusalem Post.

For years, as it has appeared sources in law enforcement were leaking stories against him in the media, Harow mostly held his fire, realizing he was restrained by his plea deal, at least until he testified. According to the deal, he will need to admit to certain minor breach of trust crimes in a couple of months before Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court and receive a sentence of six months of community service, along with a NIS 700,000 ($190,000) fine.

Interestingly enough, Harow was never asked about Case 2000 during his initial round of questioning. According to his testimony on Wednesday, the issue first arose in February 2016, when he noticed that the police had opened files related to Netanyahu’s negotiations in the case with Yediot Aharonot owner Arnon “Nuni” Mozes on his cellphone, without flagging the issue to him.

He testified on Wednesday that following this revelation, a messenger sent information to State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan regarding the recordings to make sure that no one would try to pretend that Harow had concealed something. After providing that information voluntarily, he was not questioned about the issue until five months later in July, meaning that the police did not seem to be in any rush.

At times during part of the period when he was being questioned, the police froze all of Harow’s bank accounts, seized his passport, put a lien on his house and applied so much financial pressure on him that sources close to him (he had a large number of supporters at this week’s hearings) said he had to borrow money to buy milk and go to the dentist.

From Harow’s perspective, when the police eventually demanded in around August 2017 that he cut an immunity deal to avoid prosecution, it was a move out of nowhere because he had already told them everything he knew.

Mainly, he testified in court on Wednesday that he viewed himself as “the small fish” the police were using to get “the big fish,” but they had no real interest in him. In other words, he believed the threatened prosecution and immunity deal were designed to reframe him as a state’s witness, as opposed to a regular third-party fact witness, in order to retroactively justify the abuse (Netanyahu defense lawyer Amit Hadad said in court “massive abuse”) he had suffered at the hands of law enforcement.

Harow also believed this because he said they had basically gotten everything they needed from him in previous rounds of questioning.

Many officials from both inside and outside the Netanyahu camp came out in support of Harow when asked.

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who Harow replaced to take over Netanyahu’s bureau, had previously told the Post when questioning of Harow started that “Ari is a decent, honest Zionist. I wish him well. I hope he emerges unscathed and continues to contribute to the nation of Israel.”

Michael Oren previously said it was a pleasure working closely with Harow when Oren was ambassador to the US. He called him dedicated, said he understands US-Israel relations well and said he made his job as ambassador a lot easier.

Differing narratives his interrogations

At the heart of the debate about whether the police abused Harow is if he had held anything back from them at earlier stages. A follow-up question is whether the police really believed he had committed crimes in a spin-off corporate alleged conflict of interest/fraud case relating to his company 3H Global.

At the heart of the debate about whether the police abused Harow is if he had held anything back from them at earlier stages. A follow-up question is whether the police really believed he had committed crimes in a spin-off corporate alleged conflict of interest/fraud case relating to his company 3H Global.

At the heart of the debate about whether the police abused Harow is if he had held anything back from them at earlier stages. A follow-up question is whether the police really believed he had committed crimes in a spin-off corporate alleged conflict of interest/fraud case relating to his company 3H Global.

At the end of the day, Harow testified on Wednesday that he had taken the advice of two lawyers, including Harel Arnon, a well-known Harvard-trained lawyer, about how to manage and sell his private holdings when he returned to public service. And if Arnon gave him mistaken advice, the implication in court was that he could not be accused of a crime. (Law enforcement has said it had proof that the sale of the company was fictitious.)

If all of that were true, he at worst would need to pay a fine on any funds that ended up in his hands that he was not permitted to have. It seems obvious that this was something he would have gladly done without all of the arrests, financial pressure, threats, public humiliation and attempt to frame him in criminal terms.

One theory could be that these tactics were used against Harow to lift up what was back then still a weaker case against Netanyahu, since his plea deal was cut before Case 4000, the Bezeq-Walla Affair, had become a serious and developed case for the prosecution.

The Case 2000 recordings

A lot also centers around the infamous recordings of Netanyahu’s conversations with Yediot Aharonot owner Mozes. These recordings were the basis for accusing Mozes of bribery and Netanyahu of attempted bribery in a plot to weaken Yisrael Hayom in exchange for Yediot changing its tune from anti- to pro-Netanyahu.

In some ways, Harow himself is not all that important to the various cases against Netanyahu as much as his cellphone was, since that is how the police say they first learned about Case 2000.In one of the critical Netanyahu-Mozes meetings – the one on December 4, 2015 – Harow testified that he himself was present, with his cellphone secretly inside his jacket, recording the conversation at Netanyahu’s order.On another occasion, Harow testified that he had provided his cellphone to Netanyahu, who secretly recorded the conversation.Four other meetings between the sides were not recorded on Harow’s cellphone.For the two meetings that were recorded on his phone, he testified that both took place at the Prime Minister’s Residence on the outdoor patio.In Harow’s testimony on Wednesday, he affirmed that in his view at the time, nobody had committed any crime; at most, they had acted on poor judgment. Harow testified that he had asked for legal advice on the issue from then-Netanyahu lawyer and close confidante David Shimron to make sure that it was allowed, and he was told by several individuals that it was permitted.It seems that his perspective would be that you could debate about the wisdom of Netanyahu’s mentality in worrying about meeting with Mozes without recording the conversations, but no one could say it was anything but a performance or that Netanyahu had any criminal intent. But Harow’s perspective about Netanyahu is just one perspective, and is not critical for this story. What is critical is that for his part, Harow testified that he had no idea that the recording could even potentially be a crime until his much later interrogation with police. Harow was also never accused of crimes in Case 2000.But by then, they had the recordings and did not particularly need him. So he still would say their only reason to try to reframe him as a state’s witness under threat of prosecution was to justify their extreme treatment of him earlier to get “the big fish.”This could be supported by the relatively small number of times he ended up being mentioned in the Netanyahu indictment, despite all of the huge media attention given to his signing a deal. And in the few times he is mentioned, it is generally in a passive fashion. Unlike other former Netanyahu top aides Nir Hefetz and Shlomo Filber, who the prosecution used to incriminate Netanyahu in Case 4000 – the biggest threat to Netanyahu – there has never been an indication that Harow was directly incriminating the prime minister.The indictment mostly noted that Harow could confirm that certain meetings had occurred with private-sector officials. It also emphasized that he could confirm certain meetings with Knesset members about moving forward a bill to help Yediot at the expense of Yisrael Hayom, as well as one instance of an expensive gift transfer by billionaire tycoon Arnon Milchin to Netanyahu in Case 1000.

Harow’s view in court appeared to be that to be fair, if the police spent so much time digging into Netanyahu on some of the gift and media issues in Cases 1000 and 2000, then they should have also been digging into some of his competitors, who he said had conducted themselves similarly.

For seven years until now, leaks, likely from law enforcement, have said the story was Harow taking the plea deal with the prosecution in the Netanyahu case to save his own skin from a breach-of-trust case relating to 3H Global, which was unrelated to the former and current prime minister.

But a different way to frame the tragedy of Ari Harow is that he was a regular, hard-working oleh who leapt to the top of the Israeli pyramid, while managing to remain down-to-earth in his interactions with people in his Modi’in community, and he was dragged through the mud of the Netanyahu trial based on a borderline case where his biggest mistake might have been just getting bad legal advice. The truth may only be fully understood at some distant point in the future.

None of this says anything about the wide range of cases against Netanyahu. Also, for now, views of the Netanyahu trial and every issue tied to it are so tribal and partisan that it is hard for either side to dispassionately look at individual “smaller” sagas like Ari Harow’s.

Maybe at some later point, observers will be able to look back on how he was treated and, separate from the yes/no Bibi issue, decide if his “harrowing” experience was worth it and whether it was just.

Gil Hoffman contributed to this report.

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