‘The only place where they allow me to stick my nose is the handkerchief,” said once president Chaim Weizmann.
Frail, half blind, and close to his death, Israel’s first president was frustrated that his mostly ceremonial job left him out of the political loop, after stormy decades at the heart of the Zionist project’s dramas, struggles, and intrigues.
It wasn’t much different for the next 10 presidents, except that they, unlike Weizmann, mostly liked the many ceremonies, cocktails, and encounters with the common people that the job entails. However, there were moments when the presidency mattered greatly, moments like the one President Isaac Herzog has now come to face.
History was first shaped by a president in 1982, when Yitzhak Navon, shocked by the massacre of Lebanese Palestinians by Israel’s Christian allies, demanded a judicial commission of inquiry.
Navon’s successor, Chaim Herzog, engineered in 1984 the unity government that saved Israel from economic collapse. Even more daunting was Herzog’s challenge two years later, when senior Shin Bet officials faced charges for ordering an illegal killing of unarmed terrorists, covering up the killings, framing an IDF general, and lying to investigators.
The scandal was huge not only because of the severity of the charges, but because it implicated the head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) himself, Avraham Shalom (1928-2014), and, while at it, suggested an institutional culture of unauthorized violence and of lying in court.
This was on one hand. On the other hand, all suspects had dedicated their careers to the state, at times risking their lives. Second, no one had allegedly acted for personal gain. And lastly, all wrongdoing was done in the sincere belief that it was serving national security. And that’s where the president stepped in.
Herzog endorsed a deal giving suspects amnesty before indictment in the past
A former head of Military Intelligence, but also a senior corporate lawyer, Herzog endorsed a deal whereby he granted the suspects an unprecedented amnesty before indictment, in return for their admissions of guilt and perennial departure from public office.
This is the precedent that evidently inspired Benjamin Netanyahu’s letter this week to President Isaac Herzog, hoping that the son would now do as his father did in 1986, and let the prime minister off the legal hook.
Sadly, the letter’s content demands that Herzog reply with one word: no.
The first of several astonishing things about Netanyahu’s letter is that, unlike the suspects of 1986, he admits no wrongdoing. None. In fact, it does not even use the term “pardon.” In other words, this defendant thinks that, unlike any other citizen, his sentence should be canceled regardless of what is being probed there, just because of the defendant’s identity.
Even more incredibly, Netanyahu wants the president, and the rest of us, to believe that he wants his trial discontinued because it has torn Israeli society, and now pits “the public interest” against “my personal interest, which is to conduct the trial and prove my innocence.”
While that’s what Netanyahu wants us to think, it is not, in all likelihood, what he himself thinks, which is that at least in one of his three cases – Case 1000 – he now faces conviction. Having heard the witnesses, legal experts agree that the evidence there is solid, and the offenses are grave. Illegal presents worth hundreds of thousands of shekels have been received over an extended period of time. This is what troubles Netanyahu, not our national rift.
Most perplexingly, Netanyahu actually wants us to believe he cares about this society being torn asunder. The man who showed up in court surrounded by cabinet ministers, like a mafioso out to intimidate judges and witnesses; the guy who libeled the cops, the media, the prosecution, the courts, and “the Left” of having conspired against him; the man who abandoned Israel Police to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s devices; the man who unleashed barbarians on the Supreme Court; the man who inspires a multitude of online rabble rousers – is now shedding crocodile tears over this society being torn apart.
Whodunit? he seems to be asking in wonderment, before suggesting, to our bewilderment, that the only one who can get us out of this terrible mess is he, the same one who got us into it, and that the only way for him to grant us this patriotic service is that we set aside our courts, forget our laws, mock our justice, overrule our conscience, and forfeit our self-respect.
Yes, experienced lawyers say that Netanyahu’s letter was but an opening position, designed to eventually produce a compromise along the lines of what the elder Herzog did with Avraham Shalom. Netanyahu knows, goes this theory, that the only viable deal is one that will involve on his part an admission of guilt, an acceptance of public responsibility, and a legally binding commitment to leave the premiership, or any other public office, and never return.
But this is not what we were served. What the prime minister gave you, Mr. President, is a celebration of cynicism, hypocrisy, and deceit, penned by the same man who these very days is promoting a draft-dodging bill, and thus fights justice, and signed by the same man who is blocking an impartial inquiry into the October 7 fiasco, and thus fights truth.
It follows that as long as this unrepentant letter is what Netanyahu has to say for himself, it can only be treated as the revolting document that it is.
They say that after David Ben-Gurion asked Albert Einstein to succeed Chaim Weizmann as president, Einstein called the Israeli embassy in Washington at 2 a.m. and told the sleepy guard on duty: “This is Einstein, and the answer is no.”
Your task right now, Mr. President, is to call Caesarea and say: “This is Herzog, and the answer is no.”
Middle Israel, originally slugged ‘On The Agenda,’ marks its 30th birthday today.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.