Judah Ari Gross is The Times of Israel's military correspondent.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, enters a courtroom at the Jerusalem District Court for a hearing in his corruption trial, April 5, 2021. (Oren Ben Hakoon/Pool)
“The split screen,” in its Israeli context, originally referred to an infamous, surreal 2002 television broadcast in which news coverage of a deadly terror attack in Jerusalem was aired directly alongside an ongoing Haifa-Kiryat Gat soccer match.
But on Monday the term applied to the still surreal, but far less macabre, media coverage of the opening of the evidentiary stage of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial, which was intercut with the broadcast of his political allies seeking to convince the president to give him first crack at forming a ruling coalition after last month’s inconclusive elections.