Whatever It Takes
JERUSALEM – Benjamin Netanyahu is always on the lookout for circumstances that might persuade the judges in his criminal trial to postpone the proceedings. February was an especially fruitful month in that sense. During week one, the prime minister was off on a hastily planned visit to Washington, D.C.; in week three, after the death of the mother of the chief judge in the tribunal hearing his case, court was canceled so that he could mourn her properly; and most of last week’s sessions were postponed because of the visit to Israel of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, following which Netanyahu pleaded his unavailability due to unspecified security consultations.
Today, we can assume that the premier was tied up in the final preparations for the joint American-Israeli attack on Iran, whose first bombs were dropped on Saturday morning Tehran time. Once the war began, and Israel was on a war footing, all nonessential public gatherings were prohibited, so Netanyahu has gained at least one more week of being spared the mandatory three sessions at which he is expected to appear in court to testify. When the proceedings actually resume will depend on how long the war goes on, a question to which only Donald Trump has the answer, and that varies from minute to minute.
Either way, the trial, which got under way in May 2020, more than three years after the police began to investigate him on a variety of suspected corruption charges, is beginning to wind down. A verdict could be handed down as soon as early next year, but however that falls, it will inevitably be followed by appeals.
It has been a slog.
The trial would have dragged on far longer if it didn’t allow for all three cases against Netanyahu to be heard in overlapping fashion. That has been possible because Cases 1000, 2000, and 4000 all revolve around combinations of charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, and testimony from many of the same witnesses. Together, they involve Netanyahu being charged with trading, or negotiating the exchange of, benefits he might attain for Israeli businesspeople in return for minor gifts (like Cuban cigars and bottles of champagne) or, as in the case of the two media tycoons who were indicted together with him, more favorable press coverage.
Netanyahu has from the beginning downplayed the charges, claiming over the years that “nothing will come of it, because there’s nothing there”; and that the case is an “ocean of absurd” whose real purpose has been to “overthrow the government,” a plot he recently began saying was cooked up by Israel’s “deep state,” a concept the premier apparently learned about from Donald Trump. What he hasn’t been willing, or required, to do is step back from his responsibilities in order to defend himself.
Instead, Netanyahu has waged war against the institutions that he believes conspired to bring him down: the police, the media, the prosecution, and the court system. For a defendant who wants nothing more than “to present the truth” and “puncture for good the wild and ridiculous accusations against me,” Netanyahu has pursued a relentless, scorched-earth campaign against perceived enemies, and appointed cabinet ministers who have been happy to use the powers he gave them to transform Israel from a flawed democracy that was at least struggling with its imperfections into an ultranationalist theocracy that no longer recognizes the value of the rule of law.
At the heart of their efforts has been an attempt to inculcate in the public mind the conviction that Israel’s Supreme Court, which functions as both the senior appellate court and the court of first instance in cases against the government, has effectively taken on the role of lawmaker as well. Its 15 justices allow themselves this authority, it is said repeatedly, because they are liberal, anti-religious, and generally unrepresentative of Israeli society. Think “activist judges,” only with an Israeli twist.
Netanyahu has waged war against the institutions that he believes conspired to bring him down: the police, the media, the prosecution, and the court system.
The “judicial reform”—more accurately, “judicial coup”—championed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin would effectively cancel the high court’s power of legislative review. It would also reorganize the committee responsible for all judicial appointments in Israel to give the ruling political party an automatic majority. A bill to that effect was passed by the Knesset but will take effect only after the next election. In the meantime, Levin has simply refused to convene the old committee. As a consequence, Israel has some 150 unfilled judgeships (constituting 15 percent of the total positions nationally), three of them on the 15-member high court itself, and a court system with a severe backlog.
Similarly, when Justice Yitzhak Amit was elevated to the presidency of the Supreme Court a year ago, in defiance of Levin, who wanted to buck the traditional seniority system and leapfrog his own candidate into the position, Levin took revenge by refusing to recognize Amit’s authority. Other government colleagues have joined Levin in boycotting the country’s top jurist, most recently by leaving Amit off the guest list of officials invited to the special Knesset session convened for a speech by the visiting Modi on February 25.
Also subjected to regular snubs is the beleaguered attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, who is both the government’s top legal adviser and head of the state prosecution. For her persistence in operating her office independent of political pressures (which includes pushing ahead with the legal cases against Netanyahu), the government voted to fire Baharav-Miara last August. When the high court struck down that action as illegal, government officials simply began boycotting her, too.
Neutralizing Justice Amit is also intended to justify the government’s refusal to allow the appointment of a state commission of inquiry into the catastrophic October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, and the ensuing war. A systemic political, military, and intelligence failure of that magnitude would normally lead to the convening of a blue-ribbon commission with subpoena powers, and its members would be appointed by the Supreme Court president. A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute shows such a commission having the support of nearly three-quarters of the public. Nonetheless, Netanyahu and his entourage insist that Amit has a political agenda and therefore can’t be trusted to select a panel that will perform its duties honestly. On that basis, the government has advanced a bill that would allow for the Knesset, where it has a clear majority, to select the members of an investigative body.
It gets worse. By way of leaks, anonymous briefings, and other methods of disseminating disinformation that Netanyahu has perfected over the past half-century, the premier has been incrementally building the case that everyone but he was responsible for October 7th. (For example, Netanyahu has declared that any inquiry into the causes of the 2023 debacle must hark back to the Oslo Accords negotiated by Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor government more than 30 years ago.) Last month, at a closed meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Netanyahu was pressed to say if he believed the state was betrayed from within regarding Hamas’s intentions; he reportedly acknowledged that “there was no treason,” while continuing to claim that “there was a serious intelligence failure” (undeniable) and that the former Shin Bet security service head had covered his own tracks by forging the minutes of a meeting held within his own agency on the morning of the attack.
From almost the first day of the war, Netanyahu was waging his own successful campaign against his defense minister, the army chief of staff, and the Shin Bet chief, all of whom either resigned under pressure or were fired. All had previously announced their intention to step down when conditions allowed, considering the gravity of the disaster, but the prime minister pushed them out earlier, claiming that they stood in the way of the “total victory” he was demanding. Only in his own case was he unwilling to commit to any public review of his performance, and certainly not to an early election.
DESPITE HIS REPUTATION AS A RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGUE, throughout his political career Netanyahu also proved himself a pragmatist, and his actions have generally been more cautious than his rhetoric on both domestic legislation and military entanglements. Now, though, it seems like Netanyahu is free of all restraint, in pursuit of an agenda that in every realm betrays any sense of what in Hebrew is called mamlakhtiyut, literally “statesmanship,” but referring to political comportment that gives priority to the welfare of the state and its citizenry. Beyond his war against the institutions of state, there has been the actual Gaza war, which he extended long beyond when there was strategic gain to be had, at appalling cost on all sides.
Many former Netanyahu colleagues (Israel’s recent political history is strewn with legions of his “victims”), including former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, have suggested that it was the criminal cases that caused him to lose all restraint.
I decided to turn to one of the most astute Netanyahu observers, Anshel Pfeffer, Israel correspondent for The Economist, to learn what he had to say about that. To my surprise, Pfeffer, author of the 2018 book Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, says the premier is behaving as he always has: “Every decision, every policy, every position he’s ever taken has been focused on perpetuating his own position.”
Netanyahu, says Pfeffer, “can’t imagine a world in which he’s not prime minister. The idea of stepping aside, retiring, and saying ‘good luck’ to someone else doesn’t exist for him.”
Israel, a parliamentary democracy, was dragged through five election cycles between 2019 and 2022, not only because its electorate is divided nearly evenly between what passes here for “right” and “left,” but also because, once Netanyahu was indicted, there were fewer political-party heads who would join a coalition led by him. Despite this, he was unwilling to retreat. In 2021, he was unseated by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, both ministers in earlier Netanyahu governments who were no longer willing to work with him. They patched together a fragile “government of change” by inviting Mansour Abbas, the head of an Islamic party, to join them, the first time in Israel’s history a government coalition included an Arab party.
Netanyahu devoted much of the next year working to bring down the Bennett-Lapid-Abbas coalition. Although it was he himself who had broken the taboo on Arab participation in governance by negotiating just that with Abbas prior to election number four, now that the Arab politician had signed on with the opposition, Netanyahu began mendaciously portraying him as a terror supporter.
It took a year for the “change government” to collapse; by then, Netanyahu had lined up a coalition of political outcasts who would hold onto each other tight, knowing that the leader would grant them their every wish if they kept him afloat. His new government included two of the most reviled characters in Israeli politics: the extremist, racist settler leader Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionism party, and Jewish Power party head Itamar Ben-Gvir, a lifelong follower of the late Meir Kahane whose record included eight criminal convictions (for incitement to racism and for support of a terrorist organization, among other things). What’s more, Netanyahu installed them in two of his government’s most powerful ministries (Smotrich to finance and Ben-Gvir to national security), as well as allowing them virtual veto power over its decisions.
Netanyahu’s current government is also sustained by the ultra-Orthodox parties, whose loyalty he retains by continuing to stream funding to their unregulated education networks, where their male students can study Talmud without being bothered with core subjects or with having to do army service. Despite more than a quarter-century of high court rulings against a blanket deferment for army-age Haredi men, successive Netanyahu governments have avoided writing a new law that would correct the situation to the satisfaction of the Court.
But instead of attributing an ideological transformation to Netanyahu, Anshel Pfeffer sees consistency. “If he needs to subvert the judicial system, it’s not because he has an ideology,” says Pfeffer. “In his autobiography, Netanyahu tells us how he is ‘a great believer in liberal democracy,’ that he is the epitome of liberal democracy, and so forth. That changes, however, when the independent judiciary is jeopardizing his career.”
I was left wondering how to reconcile Netanyahu’s obvious flexibility on matters of principle and policy with the legendary loyalty he is said to have to the ideological legacy of his late father. Benzion Netanyahu was a stubborn follower of the militant founder of Revisionist Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and a scholar of the most lachrymose variety of Jewish history.
I asked Pfeffer if he didn’t see the son’s chronic certainty of the impossibility of an accord between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors, and his declaration a decade ago that Israel would “forever have to live by the sword,” as part of his intellectual inheritance from his father. Pfeffer granted that “there is an ideological core” that was passed on from Benzion to Bibi, but the larger lesson that Bibi might have drawn from his father, who never attained the influence he aspired to in politics or academia, was not to follow his example.
Netanyahu père, Pfeffer points out, “remained true to his ideology … And Bibi decided [in light of that] to be pragmatic whenever it was necessary. If something is necessary for his survival, he will sacrifice his ideology.”
If the Netanyahu coalition holds together until October, at which time an election must be held, it will (incredibly) be the Knesset’s first full term since 1988. Considering the events that have transpired during its tenure, and its low approval ratings, it should have fallen long ago.
Not a week passes without a new outrage or scandal emerging from Netanyahu World, most prominently of late a series of affairs, referred to cleverly as “Qatargate,” involving several aides to the prime minister who, while working for him, were also in the employ of the Gulf emirate that could best be described as Israel’s “frenemy.”
It would be incorrect to say that none of this corruption touches Netanyahu. Rather, as in the case of the ongoing trial, Netanyahu denies any wrongdoing and plows ahead.
On November 30, 2025, Netanyahu petitioned Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, to exercise his limited quiver of powers to bring the trial to a premature end. Netanyahu wants a “pardon,” but one that would require neither an admission of guilt nor a promise to retire from public life. Like the child who kills his parents and throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan, Netanyahu wrote to Herzog that he was aware that the trial had “become a focus of intense debate,” but that he felt certain that a pardon would help “heal the rifts [and] achieve unity among the nation.”
President Trump has also pressed Herzog publicly to pardon Bibi, and on February 12, a day after meeting with Netanyahu in the Oval Office, he called on the Israeli public to “shame” Herzog for his “disgraceful” refusal to do so. In fact, Herzog, a lawyer by training, has not made a decision on the request, which he is apparently weighing with far more seriousness than it deserves. Presumably, the pressure on Herzog will only grow now that Netanyahu has saved Israel from the threat to the east.
In case Herzog ultimately doesn’t get with the program, however, members of the coalition have advanced a bill in the Knesset that would decriminalize the acts of fraud and breach of trust, and would do so retroactively, which would cancel all but one of the charges on which Netanyahu is standing trial. The way will then be cleared for him not only to run yet one more time, but to win, and finish up the work of dismantling Israel’s democracy.
The post Whatever It Takes appeared first on The American Prospect.