It was also an exploitation of his position to commandeer a prime-time audience for purely selfish political purposes, his detractors charged.

“Simply embarrassing to see,” said Itzik Shmuli, a member of Parliament from the Labor Party, who called the prime minister’s speech “a curtain of smoke meant to get the public to forget one simple fact: He is drowning in severe accusations. He is neck deep.”

From Mr. Netanyahu’s camp there was largely silence: Miri Regev, the culture minister, declared, “I believe in the prime minister’s innocence,” according to the newspaper Maariv, but hers was the loudest immediate expression of solidarity.

For months as the inquiries proceeded, Mr. Netanyahu reassured his supporters with a steady and constant refrain: “There will be nothing, because there is nothing.” But his tactics belied his unperturbed pose: He attacked the press who reported the allegations, the police who investigated them, and finally the prosecutors who oversaw the cases.

He has tried to project calm, but has also displayed an erratic side as the legal pressure mounted: After insisting in November that for national security reasons, Israel should wait to hold elections until the fall, Mr. Netanyahu reversed himself a month later. He called elections for April 9, in what appeared to be an attempt to notch a wide re-election margin before the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, could render his decision on an indictment.

Mr. Netanyahu then began arguing that, since he was entitled to a hearing after Mr. Mandelblit announces his decision and before an indictment is issued, and since there might not be time for that process to play out before voters go to the polls, Mr. Mandelblit owed it to the people to delay announcing his decision until after the vote.

That one did not fly: Mr. Mandelblit instead let it be known that he was speeding up his timetable accordingly.