This post is already much too long...
Basically: so that he could avoid a trial, Netanyahu sent through legislation defanging the judiciary, barring them from striking down legislation, from deeming a minister unfit or too corrupt for office, from barring a minster from service for prior convictions. It basically made the Prime Minister a sovereign, answerable to literally no one. The backlash: nine months of regular protests, sometimes as many as a quarter of a million people showing up to a single location. Hundreds, maybe thousands of army reservists threatening not to show up for duty. Thousands of small donations to legal funds to fight against a potential Netanyahustan.
For years before that, Netanyahu's electoral mandates were already slimming. Israeli politics is a bit like herding cattle, there are over fifty political parties and there's always the chance a stampede collapses the government. Bibi had to call new elections once every eighteen months for six years, his party never getting more than a quarter of the vote, then building paper thin coalitions nobody really wanted. But now, in order to get the majority he needed in a country growing tired of him, he did the unthinkable: scrapping together a government literally by bribing all the most distasteful parties into one tiny coalition of densely packed mole people. Here are some of the most charming parties and their leaders:
- United Torah Judaism: representing the Eastern European Orthodox, lead by Yitzhak Goldknopf, head of the Committee for the Sanctity of the Shabbat, devoted to making restrictions on public spaces and Sabbath driving, and banning Israel's national airline, El-Al, from flying on the Sabbath. Goldknopf is Minister of Housing and Construction - AKA, Minister of Settlements.
- Religious Zionist Party: a party with Jewish supremacy in its charter, lead by Betzalel Smotrich. In 2005, around the time of Israel's disengagement from Gaza, Smotrich was detained in possession of 700 liters of gasoline. This is the Minister of Finance.
- Shas: representing the Middle Eastern Orthodox, lead by Aryeh Deri. Deri was convicted of taking $155,000 in bribes while he was Interior Minister during Netanyahu's first premiereship. This was the Deputy Prime Minister until the Supreme Court deemed his seat unconstitutional.
...and the 'money shot'...
- Otzmah Yehudit (meaning "Jewish Power"): the militant far-right party, lead by Itamar Ben-Gvir, campaigning for the active deportation of the vaguely termed 'enemies of Israel.' He says it means Arabs disloyal to Israel, but nobody's sure if he actually means every Arab in the country, or even liberal Jews. What they do know is that as a lawyer, Ben-Gvir represented a who's who among Israel's hate criminals. They know he's the lawyer for Lehava, an organization for the banning of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles. They know he has a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein - who broke into a mosque and shot 150 Arabs. When he was 19, he stole the hood ornament from Yitzhak Rabin's Cadillac, brandished it on national television and said "We got to his car, we'll get to him too."
This is the Minister of National Security.
So, let's be honest, Netanyahu is not just another Prime Minister like Olmert. Netanyahu is Bibi. Even were he convicted, Netanyahu wouldn't go to jail. Somebody would pardon him in two seconds and there are enough sympathetic judges that the case itself could get thrown out if only he'd let it go to trial. The Israeli world is too divided, the Jewish world is too divided, and clearly, too much is at stake. There's a better chance Donald Trump will go to jail than that Bibi Netanyahu ever will. A trial for a guy like Netanyahu is ultimately just an inconvenience. Trump is just dumb enough to do something that lands him there, but Bibi thrives on challenges like this.
What he wants is exactly what Trump wants, and what Putin has. Democracy without liberal rule of law: illiberal democracy is a dictatorship in all but name. Every illiberal democracy thinks they have the will of the majority, but the majority always splits, and speaks for smaller and smaller slivers of society, until it speaks for one man alone - after a certain point, you might as well call yourself 'The People's Republic of...' If Israel is not an apartheid state yet, it would be the moment such a law takes effect.
I may be the only person in the world who believes this, but I find it hard to dismiss the voice in that creeping spine nausea whispering that this is exactly what Bibi Netanyahu's wanted this whole time.
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