Pardoning Netanyahu would weaken Israel, empower Trump's interference - opinion

The risky business of pardons

In his 111-page plea to President Isaac Herzog, the nation’s longest serving and most divisive prime minister claims ending his trial would “greatly help lower the flames and promote broad reconciliation” and “I can work” with (or for?) President Donald Trump to better serve the “shared interest of Israel and the United States.”

Granting a pardon without a public admission of guilt, a strong expression of remorse and immediate retirement from politics would damage public confidence in Israel’s democracy, its presidency, and its justice system – a system under unprecedented attack by the pardon seeker and his extremist government.

We’ve seen an explosion of pardons here. In less than a year, Trump, himself a convicted felon, has turned presidential pardons from acts of mercy and justice to symbols of abuse and corruption. Other president have misused the power to pardon but those were largely exceptions; for Trump, it has been the norm since Day One when he absolved the January 6 insurrectionists who tried to overturn an election – and possibly lynch a vice president who did not support their coup.

Herzog’s pardon would similarly be seen by many as political favoritism superseding the law. Trump will take full credit for the pardon and exploit it to bolster support from right-wing Jews and pro-Israel Evangelicals.

AS TRUMP’S poodle, a pardoned Netanyahu would be less free to speak up when he feels America’s actions go against Israel’s interests. A pardon would weaken Israel’s independence and democracy by sanctioning Trump’s blatant interference. For the American president it will be one more “victory” in his endless quest to be hailed as the world’s #1 leader.

Netanyahu came to office determined to end Israel’s independent judiciary, harness the free press, and stay out of jail – not necessarily in that order. In his desperation to keep his job and survive the Gaza debacle, he is making a bargain with the transactional Trump.

At the same time that Netanyahu sent his plea to Herzog, he was invited to the White House for his fifth visit this year. Trump is likely to tell him some version of “I own you, and you owe me big time.” It will reduce Israel to a client state.

Trump already has begun giving orders. In June he ordered Netanyahu to “bring your pilots home, now!” and don’t bomb Iran after the president made a deal with Tehran; in October he ordered Israel to “immediately stop bombing of Gaza,” and lately to not “interfere” in Syria, where he’s taken a liking to its new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and he wants to build an air base there.

Trump wants to cut a nuclear deal with Iran – remember, this is a guy for whom having a “deal” can be more important than what’s in it – and this time, Bibi will have to go along unquestioningly, unlike what he did when he led the opposition’s lobbying against a sitting president: Barack Obama.

How will Bibi respond when Trump opens a military relationship with the new Syrian regime and tells Israel to stop bombing and withdraw from that country? Or maybe even give back the Golan Heights? Or when he decides to push Palestinian statehood as the Saudis and his other Arab allies insist? Or makes weapons deals that may threaten Israel’s qualitative military advantage?

Netanyahu says a pardon would speed national reconciliation, but it is more likely to have the opposite effect. Polls show a plurality of Israelis oppose dropping his corruption case. Reconciliation means replacing the most extreme government in the nation’s history with new leadership, not handing out a get-out-of-jail-free card.

RECONCILIATION MUST also reach beyond Israel’s borders. Netanyahu has been a highly divisive figure not only in Israel but in the United States and elsewhere as well.

Support for Israel has been shrinking in America, with some polls showing greater sympathy for the Palestinian cause than for the Jewish state in the wake of the Gaza war. Rightly or not, many hold Netanyahu responsible for that erosion. Even before the war, his attempts to end judicial independence in Israel were seen as a dangerous assault on democracy.

For many years, Netanyahu cultivated the Republican Party, particularly Evangelicals and religious conservatives, at the expense of the Democratic Party, the traditional home of American Jewry. With Trump in the White House, he’s been gushing adoration of the president like a love-sick adolescent, which further turns away Jewish voters.

As Israel under Netanyahu moved away from its historic base and farther to the right, it has begun encountering serious problems in that direction as well. Young Evangelicals don’t share the love of Israel that their parents’ generation has. More troubling are growing isolationism in the MAGA movement and the rising tide of right-wing antisemitism, as seen in the followers of conservative influencers Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes.

From an American political perspective, Israel has a lot of rebuilding ahead, and a presidential pardon would be viewed by many as a move in the wrong direction – sanctioning Netanyahu’s corruption, divisiveness, anti-democracy extremism, hostility toward Palestinians, and subservience to Trump. Those two would-be autocrats may go together, but the American and Israeli people deserve much better.