Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s formal request on Sunday for a presidential pardon marks the most dramatic turn yet in a legal drama that has consumed Israel for nearly a decade.
Five and a half years into the trial, nine years after the investigations began, and 28 years since the first inquiry into his conduct as prime minister – the Bar-On-Hebron Affair – the question is no longer only whether he is guilty of the charges in Cases 1000, 2000, and 4000.
The deeper question is what prolonging this trial is doing to the country, and whether ending it – however imperfect the mechanism – might finally allow Israel to move on.
It is impossible to understand the reaction around Sunday’s development without recalling the full history of the myriad investigations into Netanyahu’s actions over the years. Netanyahu has lived under some form of investigation for most of his long tenure as prime minister.
The list is long.
In 1997 came the Bar-On affair, where the police recommended charges, but the attorney-general declined to indict. Two years later, it was the Amedi affair, followed by the “gifts affair” over items removed from the Prime Minister’s Residence when he left office in 1999.
None of these resulted in prosecution.
In the early 2000s came the “double billing” travel controversies, again closed without charges. By 2013, Netanyahu was weathering stories about state-funded pistachio ice cream and a bedroom installed on a plane – matters that ended in embarrassment but not criminal proceedings.
Over the years came additional inquiries into laundry expenses, catering services, furniture purchases, and more.
His critics saw smoke everywhere; his supporters saw an abuse of the legal system to hound political adversaries.
That background colors the public debate now. Many Israelis, especially those who have supported Netanyahu since the 1990s, genuinely believe that his political opponents, concluding they could not defeat him at the ballot box, decided to bring him down via the defendant’s dock.
His critics see in this long chain of inquiries not persecution but a consistent pattern of questionable judgment and blurred ethical boundaries by him and his wife. These two narratives – one of victimhood, one of misconduct – will now shape how Israelis view his decision to seek a pardon.
Netanyahu himself argues that the trial has reached an absurd point. He is now required to testify three days a week, unprecedented for a sitting prime minister, especially one leading a country at war.
Regardless of one’s view of his culpability, it is hard to deny that hours spent on the witness stand parsing decade-old conversations and discussing cigars, champagne bottles, Bugs Bunny dolls, and editorial phone calls come at the expense of governing.
His supporters insist that history will one day shake its head at the spectacle of a wartime leader shuttling between court and security cabinet, unable to devote his full attention or energy to hostage negotiations, regional diplomacy, or bombing sorties against Iran.
Netanyahu writes a formal letter requesting a pardon
The argument that the trial is tearing the country apart is also not easily dismissed. Netanyahu’s formal letter to President Isaac Herzog requesting a pardon invokes that phrase.
While his critics may roll their eyes at this diagnosis, saying he is the one responsible for the nation’s divisions, they cannot deny the broader truth: This trial has become a national fault line. It has warped politics, fueled conspiracy theories, and undermined trust in national institutions.
At the same time, a sober analysis must acknowledge that there are serious arguments against granting a pardon.
The first and most powerful is that no one is above the law. Allowing a sitting prime minister to halt his own trial without admitting guilt or resigning raises legitimate questions about the integrity of democratic norms.
A pardon at this moment – before conviction, before a verdict, before the evidence has fully run its course – would be unlike anything in Israel’s history. The Bus 300 pardons approved by president Chaim Herzog in 1986 occurred before indictment, but they involved security officials, not the nation’s leader.
US president Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974 is often invoked as a parallel, but even that comparison is imperfect: Nixon had resigned when Ford issued the pardon. In contrast, Netanyahu seeks to remain in power.
Another argument centers on the Israeli and American traditions surrounding pardons. In both systems, accepting a pardon historically carries an implicit acknowledgment of guilt. Netanyahu, by contrast, insists on his innocence even as he asks for a pardon, and he argues that the cases against him were tainted by investigative misconduct.
A pardon without any admission of guilt is not a pardon in the conventional sense; it is a termination of a trial. Critics fear that it sets a dangerous precedent: that prime ministers can avoid accountability simply by arguing that they are too important, or that the country is too fragile, or that the trial is too divisive.
Yet the counterargument remains: How long can Israel afford to let this play out? The trial began in 2020. Testimony will continue well into 2026. A verdict could arrive in 2027 or 2028, with appeals dragging the matter to 2030 or beyond. That means another half-decade in which the country remains locked in the same argument it has been having since 2016.
This is where the exhausted middle of the country comes in. Between those who will not rest until Netanyahu sits in a rat-infested prison cell, and those who will not rest until he is declared a saint, lies a broad swath of Israelis who want something simpler: to stop living inside this endless saga.
They want the country to function. They want politics to return to normal, not stymied and pushed to the extremes because parties are unwilling to sit around a table with Netanyahu.
In a telling indication of how the broader public – and not just the political class – reacted, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange surged across the board immediately after news of the pardon request broke.
Markets are not moral arbiters, but they are barometers of stability, and investors seemed to interpret the possibility of closure as a welcome step toward national calm. That reaction was not ideological; it was practical. The country is exhausted.
The cleanest option would have been a plea bargain tied to Netanyahu stepping down from politics. In a perfect world, he would have taken that deal years ago, Israel would have thanked him for his service, acknowledged his achievements, and turned the page.
But this is not that world. Netanyahu is not resigning. He is not admitting guilt. And the public, not the courts, will decide his political fate when it next goes to the polls, no later than next October.
The question, then, is whether the country benefits from another year or two of testimony, followed by years of appeals, followed by years of recrimination. Or whether it is healthier to end this now, recognizing this is an imperfect solution, but also recognizing the reality: The trial has become a national burden, not a national asset.
Israel cannot remain forever trapped in this loop. Not every national challenge is best resolved by insisting that a process continue simply because it began, especially when there are serious questions about whether the process should have even started at all.
There are too many holes in the case, too many questions about investigative conduct, too much damage already caused to national institutions. And at a moment when Israel faces extraordinary dangers and rare opportunities, it is reasonable to ask whether extending this saga benefits the country or harms it.
Israel deserves to move on. It deserves to focus on the ongoing fighting in Gaza, on the diplomatic realignments in the region, on the healing and rebuilding needed at home.
It deserves to reclaim its bandwidth from a trial that has consumed far too much of it. Whether through a pardon or another mechanism, the time has come to close this chapter – not for Netanyahu, but for the country.