The Killer of Gaza Asks For a "Pardon"
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| Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. His petition to the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, admitted nothing and expressed no contrition.Credit...Pool photo by Alex Kolomoisky |
Reporting from Jerusalem
New York Times
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request on Sunday for a pardon that would short-circuit his long-running corruption trial was made in the dryly polite terms of a legal brief, not in the provocative language of a social-media post.
In its sheer audacity, however, it seemed ripped from the playbook of another leader who did not let multiple felony charges, or even a conviction, stop him from seeking power: President Trump.
Mr. Netanyahu’s petition to the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, admitted nothing and expressed no contrition. In a one-page letter that he himself signed, he did not use the word “pardon,” instead stiffly requesting an “end of the trial.” It came a little more than two weeks after President Trump sent a letter to Mr. Herzog urging him to pardon Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers, in a 111-page filing, assailed the way he had been investigated, the timing of his indictment and the substance of the charges against him, and insisted that he would be acquitted in the end.
There, too, were many similarities in the filing to tactics favored by Mr. Trump, including demonizing the law enforcement system, portraying Mr. Netanyahu as a victim and appearing to hint at the prospect of retribution.
The lawyers argued that for the good of Israel, its leader should be freed from wasting valuable time defending himself in court. (No matter that Mr. Netanyahu had rejected calls when he was indicted in 2019 that he step down to face trial rather than be distracted from running the country.)
The pardon request immediately hijacked the Israeli political conversation. It had been dominated by criticism of the Netanyahu government’s highly unpopular bill to exempt many members of the ultra-Orthodox community from military service and of his efforts to sidestep a national commission of inquiry into the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack.
Opposition leaders had been assailing Mr. Netanyahu on those issues, on which polls show that the government is out of step with the public. Now they were forced to pivot to Mr. Netanyahu’s pardon request, arguing that it could not be granted without steep concessions from the prime minister.
Naftali Bennett, who served a year as prime minister in 2021 and is planning a comeback in the next election, supported a pardon as long as it came with Mr. Netanyahu’s “respectful retirement from political life.”
The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, declared that the president could not legally pardon Mr. Netanyahu “without an admission of guilt, an expression of remorse and an immediate retirement from political life.”
Naftali Bennett seated at a table, hands clasped, looking right. Yair Lapid speaks beside him.
Naftali Bennett, left, and Yair Lapid. The two opposition leaders said that any pardon for Mr. Netanyahu should come with steep concessions.Credit...Pool photo by Maya Alleruzzo
Reuven Hazan, a political science professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that Mr. Netanyahu’s request was intended to distract.
“He threw this out there to have us do what we’re doing right now, which is talk about this and not those other issues,” Mr. Hazan said. “He moves the agenda. And there’s no one in Israeli politics that can do it as well as he can.”
There also may be no one in Israeli politics with as much chutzpah.
In a video statement released with his pardon request, Mr. Netanyahu portrayed his gambit to escape trial as a public-minded sacrifice.
“My personal interest was to continue the process to its end, until full acquittal on all charges,” he said. “But the security and political reality, the national interest — these require otherwise.”
Of course, for two years, Mr. Netanyahu said he was too busy prosecuting Israel’s war in Gaza to be bothered defending himself against prosecution on graft and breach of trust charges. By that logic, he should have plenty more bandwidth now to handle his criminal defense.
But his lawyers instead pointed to unspecified “golden opportunities” for Israel in the Middle East. This was presumably an allusion to expanding the Abraham Accords to include normalization with Saudi Arabia, a much-dangled possibility — if only the prime minister were “able to devote all of his time and energy” to capitalizing on them.
The trial began in 2020 and has moved slowly, with the prime minister frequently asking for delays. His lawyers say they expect to call as many as 100 witnesses in his defense, and some estimates now suggest the trial might not conclude until 2028.
Mr. Netanyahu testified on Monday but successfully asked to cancel his scheduled appearance on Tuesday, a court spokesman said. He is next due in court on Wednesday.
In the video on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu warned that going ahead with his trial “tears us apart from within, fuels fierce disputes and deepens rifts.” He suggested that aborting it would “greatly help lower the flames and advance the broad reconciliation our country so urgently needs.”
Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster who worked for Mr. Netanyahu in the 1990s, called the reference to societal rifts laughable.
“He’s the one that caused the divisiveness, and he continues to cause it,” Mr. Barak said.
Still, Professor Hazan saw the move as a brilliant ploy. If Mr. Netanyahu’s petition works, he escapes criminal liability. If it does not, and his trial proceeds, he has a new issue to run on in next year’s election — a supposed witch hunt against him.
“The whole letter is written in a way that allows him to campaign on this if he’s not given a pardon,” Professor Hazan said.
In portraying himself as a victim of an out-of-control law-enforcement system in his pardon request, Mr. Netanyahu again bears more than a passing resemblance to Mr. Trump, who howled over his own victimhood during his criminal and civil trials and made it a central campaign theme in 2024.
The self-praise rings a bell, too: Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers note that they couldn’t possibly recount all that the prime minister has done for Israel over his lifetime. Then, they spend more than 1,300 words doing just that, from his military service as a commando in his 20s, to his economic stewardship and infrastructure investments, to his national-security record in fighting enemies including Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.
In fact, in their zeal to make every plausible argument for a pardon, Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers invoked an Israeli law that offered amnesty to some people convicted of nonviolent crimes, in which special consideration was to be given to those who “contributed to the security and resilience of the state,” especially in the two-year war against Hamas. The implication was clear: Mr. Netanyahu himself was one such soldier deserving of forgiveness.
Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s promises to unify the country if pardoned, critics saw an air of menace in his statements on Sunday.
Mr. Netanyahu noted that, if pardoned, he would be free to resume making policy on the judicial system and the media. He was forced to recuse himself from those issues because of his trial on charges that he arranged favors for media tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic news coverage for himself and his family.
That could pave the way for Mr. Netanyahu or his allies to try to exact retribution against those he holds responsible for putting him on trial, some critics suggested.
The parallels with Mr. Trump may end with Mr. Netanyahu’s reliance on Mr. Trump’s backup for his pardon request, said Gayil Talshir, a lecturer in political science at Hebrew University.
Mr. Trump wrote to Mr. Herzog two weeks ago urging that he “fully pardon” Mr. Netanyahu and calling the case against him a “political, unjustified prosecution.”
Mr. Netanyahu cited Mr. Trump’s appeal to Mr. Herzog in his video statement on Sunday.
Ms. Talshir pointed to that Trump letter as a sign of Mr. Netanyahu’s sheepishness — a significant point of departure from the American president.
“This is his main argument: that Trump has put forward the letter which Bibi, of course, asked him to put forward,” she said. “So he leans on Trump to excuse his own behavior.”
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