For the past five years, Benjamin Netanyahu has been on trial for corruption, accused of accepting lavish gifts in exchange for political favors and of using his influence to pressure media moguls into giving him more favorable coverage. On Sunday, the Israeli leader formally asked the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, to let him off the hook, requesting a pardon before the court had even reached a verdict on the allegations. The brazen gambit immediately provoked sharp responses within Israel. But one of the most shocking aspects of the prime minister’s ploy was largely overlooked.
Netanyahu’s entreaty to Herzog was carefully worded to avoid any admission of criminality or wrongdoing, aside from a vague reference to feeling responsible for the legal proceedings stoking “tensions and disputes” within Israel. “The prime minister will not admit guilt,” his aides bluntly told the media. But the official pardon request from Netanyahu’s lawyer, as well as a video message released by Netanyahu justifying it, did something just as damning: It acknowledged that Netanyahu has been incapable of fully performing the duties of his position, even as he hung on to the job anyway.
“Granting this request will allow the prime minister to devote all of his time, abilities, and energy to advancing Israel in these critical times and to dealing with the challenges and opportunities that lie before it,” wrote Amit Hadad, Netanyahu’s lawyer, implying that until now, his client had been unable to do so. “I am required to testify three times a week,” Netanyahu griped in his video posted to social media soon afterward. “This is an impossible requirement that no other citizen in Israel is subjected to.” The prime minister maintained his innocence in the clip, and insisted that he was willing to fight his charges to “full acquittal.” But in fact, the claims made by Netanyahu and his lawyer confirm the very thing that the premier’s trial fundamentally sought to prove: that he has been unfit to serve as Israel’s prime minister.
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By Netanyahu’s own admission, at a time when Israel faced war on four fronts, its leader was preoccupied by his legal predicament. No country, let alone one facing existential threats during wartime, could be competently governed by someone so compromised. Nonetheless, Netanyahu refused to step aside, placing his personal political interest ahead of the national interest.
The consequences of this choice have been devastating for Israel’s citizens and the region. Consider the chain of events since Netanyahu’s trial began, in May 2020. After the allegations against him coalesced into a court case, many Israeli politicians—including former Netanyahu allies—declared that they could not serve someone under indictment for corruption. As a result, from 2021 to 2022, Netanyahu’s government was briefly replaced by a rainbow coalition of left and right parties opposed to his continued rule. But in 2022, Netanyahu managed to return to power, backed by the only people still willing to support him—extreme sectarian factions whose leaders shrewdly recognized that they could extort Netanyahu for their own purposes, because they held his future in their hands.
As a private citizen, Netanyahu was at the mercy of the courts. As the prime minister, he was able to slow down his trial, duck testimony dates by citing his official responsibilities, and begin browbeating the system into granting him a favorable plea deal or pardon. All he had to do was keep his radical allies happy so that they would keep him in office. The result was governance by shakedown, which turned Israel’s democracy against the preferences of the majority of its people in favor of the demands of the narrow constituencies keeping Netanyahu afloat. The man once dubbed “King of Israel” became a slave to his most unhinged subjects.
Under this dispensation, far-right anti-Arab parties secured unprecedented authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank—and near-total impunity for settler violence against Palestinians. At the same time, within Israel’s borders, a hard-right proposal to disempower the judiciary met with opposition from most Israelis and provoked the largest sustained protest movement in the country’s history, pushing the public to the brink of civil war. With its leaders and people divided and distracted, Israel was left vulnerable to the Hamas assault on October 7, 2023, resulting in the worst day of Jewish death since the Holocaust.
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The problems didn’t end there. Two years of war on multiple fronts made clear that Israel faced a manpower shortage, but its army was nonetheless unable to draft additional recruits. The reason? Netanyahu’s government was beholden to ultra-Orthodox religious parties, whose constituents refused to serve—despite supermajorities of Israelis, including most Netanyahu voters, opposing such exemptions.
Meanwhile, the war in Gaza dragged on for many months beyond the point when polls showed that most Israelis wanted to end it, because Netanyahu’s messianic coalition partners hoped to ethnically cleanse and settle the territory. The conflict concluded only when Netanyahu was compelled by another even more powerful actor who held him over a barrel—President Donald Trump. The stark reality is that for years, Netanyahu has not been leading Israel but rather has been led by those whose support he needs to survive, and his nation has suffered for it, slowly shredding its internal cohesion, democratic legitimacy, and international freedom of action.
“My personal interest was—and remains—to continue the process until its end, until full acquittal,” Netanyahu declared in his video calling for a pardon. “But the security and political reality—the national interest—dictate otherwise.” The truth is the reverse: Netanyahu’s disastrous misrule since his return to office has demonstrated why he should have stepped aside long ago if he truly cares about the national interest. That he refuses to do so, and instead demands that the system bend to his whims, suggests that his patriotic appeals are a pretense. Netanyahu presents himself as paying a price for Israel, but in actuality, Israel’s people are paying the price for his unwillingness to cede power.
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