That defense won’t be available to Netanyahu with the Mozes case. Their rivalry has become the stuff of legends in Israel. Now, they may be closer than ever to achieving that goal—ironically, at each other’s expense.

For much of his 30-plus years as the owner and chief editor of Yediot Aharonot, Mozes has been criticized for leveraging the paper’s immense popularity to curry favor with politicians from across the spectrum. In its heyday, Yediot’s circulation reached more than 50 percent of newspaper readers in Israel. Former editors and writers at Yediot have described a “favorites list” kept by the paper’s senior management, which reportedly includes the names of politicians, business moguls, and other powerful people who helped advance the Mozes family’s interests. In return, they have received positive coverage, according to former Yediot workers. The paper’s management has consistently denied these allegations.

True or not, one thing is clear: If there is such a list, Netanyahu certainly isn’t mentioned in it. Yediot has broken some of the most damaging stories of his career. That includes a report on a tape recording in which his wife, Sara, was heard saying: “Bibi is too great for this country. Let this country burn, we will move to live abroad.” Rottem Danon, the editor of Israel’s top weekend news broadcast and an expert on Netanyahu’s complicated history with the Israeli media, told me it wasn’t always this way. Danon said that when Netanyahu served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s, Yediot covered him favorably, praising his command of English and writing about the “admiration” he received from America’s Jewish community.

But things changed in the 1990s, when Netanyahu became the leader of the opposition in the Knesset, and went up against then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. When Rabin was murdered by a right-wing extremist in 1995, large parts of the Israeli media, including Yediot, blamed Netanyahu for encouraging wild incitement against Rabin before the murder. After Rabin’s death, Netanyahu ran for prime minister against Shimon Peres. Despite Yediot's pro-Peres coverage, Netanyahu eked out a narrow win. For the next two and a half years, he stumbled from one public relations disaster to another before being forced to call an early election. Through it all, he believed that Mozes’s paper was ignoring his achievements and turning minor incidents into scandals.

Netanyahu’s frustration boiled over in 1999, after he suffered a humiliating election defeat. “Netanyahu thought that his loss wasn’t a result of policy, credibility or character flaws,” Alon Pinkas, a former senior Israeli diplomat (who occasionally writes political commentary for Yediot), told me. “He attributed the loss to a comprehensive campaign that Yediot supposedly waged against him. It became an obsession for him.”