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Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not seem to think that his country fighting a war on seven fronts is enough. Therefore, he has opened another one. Or, more accurately, he has reopened a battle on the domestic front with greater intensity.
More specifically, he is targeting the gatekeepers of Israel’s democratic system. Without them to worry about, he believes he can remain in power forever, while avoiding a reckoning in his corruption trial.
Long before the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas, and the subsequent war, Netanyahu’s sole aim was to get himself off the hook from the fraud, bribery, and breach of trust charges that have been under deliberation by a court in Jerusalem for a staggering four-and-a-half years.
The first trial of an Israeli prime minister while in office should have been a triumph for the rule of law, an illustration of the equality of all people in the eyes of the law and of good governance. Instead, it has become a battle for the very soul of Israeli democracy, conducted cynically by Netanyahu through exploitation of the fragility of the democratic system and the ever-widening cracks within it.
Netanyahu and his political minions have been purging the democratic system of its gatekeepers, without whom the path to authoritarianism is frighteningly short.
When the first allegations of corruption against Netanyahu emerged in 2017, over expensive gifts from wealthy businessmen with economic interests in the country, I naively believed his days in politics were surely numbered. After all, even if the case was found not to be worthy of criminal prosecution, it still demonstrated a gross lack of judgment, and detachment from the daily hardships that many of those who voted for him endure in their daily lives.
Instead, Netanyahu, his family, and his close political allies declared war on anyone who suggested he might be guilty of any wrongdoing, be it the public prosecutor, the media, political rivals or civil society. His critics became the targets of vicious attacks, including allegations that they were serving foreign interests; in other words, they were guilty of treason.
When Netanyahu was offered a plea bargain deal by Avichai Mandelblit, the attorney general at the time, he rejected it almost instantly. To be honest, the offer also felt wrong to me; it would have stuck in the collective Israeli memory that, unlike us mere mortals, the high and mighty receive preferential treatment when they break the law, and it would have allowed him to leave politics with hardly any blemish on his character.
This would probably have seen him become a darling of the political right, mainly in the US but also in Europe, able to charge obscene fees for lecture appearances worldwide while galvanizing those who believed the “deep state” was out to get him.
On reflection, despite my opposition at the time to the very idea of a plea bargain for the most powerful politician in the country, I now believe that the lives of so many Israelis, Palestinians and others could have been spared had he not still been in power, and Israeli society would not have become so polarized.
However, the plea bargain train left the station a long time ago. Instead, there has been an all-out attack on the very foundations of Israeli democracy. It began immediately after the first allegations against Netanyahu came to light and has intensified in stark correlation with the worsening state of his political and legal entanglements.
No one plays the victim, domestically and internationally, better than Netanyahu.
Yossi Mekelberg
To this end, in 2022 he was prepared to form a coalition government with the most extreme, far-right, racist, and antidemocratic elements in Israeli society, and has bent over backward to appease them. With their support, he has embarked on an assault on the judiciary and its independence, and is subjecting the civil service to his personal whims and interests.
Netanyahu is now behaving like the head of a mafia family by making it clear that the only criterion for working with him is to demonstrate total loyalty and be prepared to support his toxic machinery of smears, slurs, and incitements against all those still fighting to save Israel’s democracy, the rule of law, and the principle of decency in public life.
No one is more directly in the firing line than Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who has been under constant attack to the extent that she requires round-the-clock security to protect her. It was reported that during a recent Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu accused her of being a “contrarian” who was prepared to allow the previous Bennett-Lapid government to act illegally but obstructs his government with legal challenges.
No one plays the victim, domestically and internationally, better than Netanyahu. Of course, he is actually the bully.
In an unprecedented move against the problem that Baharav-Miara presents him with, he has ordered Justice Minister Yariv Levin “to solve it.” This is the type of behavior one might expect from the head of an organized crime family, not the leader of a free country.
Baharav-Miara infuriates Netanyahu’s government because she insists, for example, on following the orders of the High Court of Justice to ensure that ultra-Orthodox youths are drafted into military service like everyone else, or that appointments to key civil service positions are transparent and meet legal guidelines.
It remains to be seen what kind of “solution” Levin, who is the driving force behind the judicial coup, will come up with; we can only hope no bags of cement will be involved.
But it is not only Baharav-Miara who has been targeted by the coalition. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was sacked this month. He advocated for a ceasefire deal with Hamas, the drafting of ultra-Orthodox youths into military service and, sin of all sins, a formal inquiry into the disastrous security failures of Oct. 7 that most likely would have found Netanyahu to be the principal culprit and would have led to calls for his resignation.
For similar reasons, Netanyahu would also like to see the back of the Israeli army’s chief of staff, Hertzi Halevi, and the head of security agency Shin Beit, Ronen Bar, thereby allowing him to replace them with loyalists and lay the entire blame for Oct. 7 at the door of the security services while portraying himself as the innocent victim of their failures.
Both Halevi and Bar, unlike Netanyahu, accepted responsibility for their parts in the disaster almost from day one. But it was the prime minister who appointed them, and that alone should have been enough for him to shoulder the responsibility for their failures, let alone the fact that they were implementing his policies, which ended in the worst massacre of Jews in a single day since 1945.
Make no mistake, the most dangerous of all the fronts in this war for Israel is the attacks by Netanyahu and his current coalition partners on the country’s democratic system and the institutions that are keeping the country going despite a failing government.
Without them, Israel would change beyond recognition forever and be much the worse for it.
• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House.
X: @YMekelberg