What Israel’s political crisis tells us about the dangers of indicting Trump

A March 18 protest in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul. | Ilia Yefimovich/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical response to his indictment — and what it might portend for a potential Trump arrest.

If the Manhattan district attorney does file charges against Donald Trump this week, as has been widely reported, it will be an American first: No president, sitting or former, has ever been indicted on criminal charges.

But in peer democracies, it’s far from unheard of. France, Portugal, South Korea, Croatia, and Israel have all indicted former presidents and prime ministers.

Of these countries, the closest parallels — and the most disturbing — come from contemporary Israel, a country in the midst of the gravest domestic political crisis since its founding. And it is a crisis that was set off in no small part by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s indictment on a series of corruption-related charges.

After winning Israel’s election in November 2022, Netanyahu — who had previously been in office in 1996-1999 and 2009-2021 — swiftly set about pushing a series of new laws imposing tighter political control on the legal system.

The proposals, unveiled earlier this year, would deliver Netanyahu’s coalition partners on the far right a long-desired leash to rein in the (relatively) liberal Supreme Court. It also gives Netanyahu powers that he could use to nullify the case against him.

The reaction has been a national uprising: 11 straight weeks of massive and disruptive street protests. On March 12 alone, about 500,000 Israelis took to the streets across the country — roughly the same number of Americans who attended protests on the biggest day of 2020’s Black Lives Matter demonstration, in a country with about 1/35th of America’s population.

Being indicted pushed Netanyahu to radical lengths: a willingness to partner with extremists and pursue anti-democratic policies that he had previously decried, all in the name of staying out of prison.

We should expect no less from Trump and his supporters.

Politically, Trump and Netanyahu are very much alike: charismatic populists who have transformed established center-right parties into cults of personality. Netanyahu was prime minister for Trump’s entire presidency and emerged as one of his closest allies on the global stage, even putting Trump on one of his campaign posters.

Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto/Getty Images

A Trump/Netanyahu campaign poster in Tel Aviv during the 2019 campaign.

Both men stand accused of serious anti-democratic abuses while in office. Both have responded with nearly identical campaigns against legal authorities, accusing investigators of engaging in a “witch hunt” at the behest of liberal elites.

Trump has already called for his supporters to take to the streets to protest his indictment. So far, these calls have amounted to little, but if an indictment indeed comes down, the energy level among the MAGA faithful could change in a hurry. We saw where such a dynamic could lead on January 6, 2021. And there’s an entire presidential election cycle left to go.

None of this is to say that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg should not prosecute Trump if he truly believes the evidence warrants it. Influential people cannot be above the law in a democracy; in Israel, the case against Netanyahu is serious and speaks to the heart of his anti-democratic behavior during his last tenure in office. It was right to prosecute Netanyahu, and it could very well be right to prosecute Trump. We’ll likely find out soon enough.

But the ongoing chaos in Israel should serve as a warning: Under political conditions like those in the US, going after the country’s most influential and polarizing political figure can lead to unpredictable and potentially devastating consequences. Americans should once again be preparing for things to get worse.

How Netanyahu’s indictment led to chaos

Before we can talk about what Israel tells us about Trump, it’s important to understand just what exactly is happening in Israel.

During his long stretch in office between 2009 and 2021, Netanyahu engaged in a series of ethically and legally questionable behaviors. The Israeli police began quietly investigating him in 2016 and eventually recommended charges in three investigations known as Case 1000, Case 2000, and Case 4000.

Of these, Case 4000 is the most explosive. Israeli prosecutors allege that, while in office, Netanyahu struck a corrupt deal with the parent company of Walla, a major online news outlet. The prime minister allegedly approved a lucrative merger for the company in exchange for more favorable coverage in Walla — corruptly using the powers of his office to undermine the free press and strengthen his own political position.

Netanyahu responded to the charges by embracing a longstanding cause on the extreme right, one that he had previously shunned: waging all-out war on Israel’s independent judiciary.

Israel’s far right, made up of radical settlers and religious extremists, had long seen the court as one of the major impediments to their efforts to seize control of Palestinian land and increase Judaism’s role in Israeli public life. Its politicians and think tanks had developed a series of proposals — like a bill allowing the Knesset to override Supreme Court rulings with a simple majority vote — designed to bring the court’s allegedly liberal justices to heel.

In the past, Netanyahu had vocally opposed such ideas. Israel’s judiciary is “what enables the existence of all other democratic institutions,” he said in 2012, during a round of debates about court reform. “In the last few months, I buried every law that threatens the independence of the [judicial] system ... I will continue to do so.”

Then the indictments happened.

The onetime defender of Israel’s court system changed his tune, declaring (in one representative 2020 outburst) that the country was “no democracy” but rather “a government of bureaucrats and jurists.” He and his allies began floating legislative remedies for his prosecution, like the so-called “French law” immunizing incumbent prime ministers from prosecution.

Netanyahu purged his Likud party of the remaining critics of his behavior, turning it into a far-right vehicle for his all-encompassing quest to avoid jail time. Israeli politics polarized around whether or not Netanyahu was fit for office — with some right-wing parties even briefly joining a coalition with the anti-Netanyahu center and left on grounds that he was threatening democracy and the rule of law.

In 2022, after five narrow elections in three and a half years, Netanyahu finally emerged with a solid majority. This majority depended on an alliance with the most extreme of extreme factions, Israel’s Religious Zionist party: a militantly anti-Palestinian faction committed to waging war on the judiciary.

As a result, the new government’s first major legislative push was a comprehensive “court reform” package that would impose significant political controls on the judiciary. This includes not only the previously discussed “override clause,” but also provisions politicizing the process for appointing judges, weakening the independence of the attorney general’s office, and limiting court power to review actions taken by the executive.

If passed, this legislation would allow the far-right coalition to control the legal system and give Netanyahu tools he could use to end the case against him. Some of these proposals could become law before the Knesset breaks for the Passover holiday in early April.

Netanyahu’s agenda is, understandably, widely unpopular. A late February poll from the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute found that large majorities oppose many of the package’s key planks (roughly two-thirds of Israelis oppose the override clause, for example). The opposition has been so intense, with many seeing the bills as an attack on the foundations of Israeli democracy, that it has galvanized what appears to be the largest protest movement in Israeli history: nearly three months of nonstop street demonstrations, joined by some of the country’s most influential and prominent figures, demanding that the government change course.

Gili Yaari/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Protesters against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul bills in Tel Aviv on March 18, 2023.

So far, however, there’s no indication that it will. Netanyahu has rejected a compromise reform package authored by Israeli President Isaac Herzog and seems intent on barreling through some version of his initial idea. If the bills do pass, litigation is inevitable — and there is a reasonable chance that Israel’s Supreme Court will strike them down.

Such a ruling would lead to a constitutional crisis, where different elements of the government disagree on what the law is and who gets to decide on it. In such situations, other institutions — like the police and military — may have to decide whom to obey.

It is about the most severe crisis that a democracy can face, and Israel is rapidly heading toward it.

“Now, when we are reaching Israel’s 75th anniversary, the country is on the brink of the abyss,” President Herzog warned in a speech last week. “A civil war is a red line — and I will not let that happen.”

The big lesson for America: Indictments raise the stakes

One key point of the Israeli story, from an American view, is that an indictment radically changes a politician’s incentives.

For most of his career, Netanyahu had a reputation as a calculating and cautious politician. True, he was relatively right wing, but he always seemed to have a sense of what was too far and the attendant danger of political chaos.

But since his indictment, he has changed: willing to embrace autocratic policies that he had previously rejected and to align himself with forces in Israeli politics that had long been consigned to the country’s margins.

Netanyahu’s shift speaks to the way the threat of a felony conviction changes one’s incentives. If you think you’re going to prison, you have nothing to lose by fighting with every tool available. When you’re the nation’s leading politician, with a Trump-like fervent following built up over decades, that means trying to turn the government into your personal get-out-of-jail-free card.

What exactly this looks like in Trump’s case is hard to predict. His call for protests provides a clue, but only that: The potential avenues for extra-legal incitement on Trump’s part are legion.

The only thing we can be almost certain of is that he won’t drop out of the presidential race. Returning to the presidency would be his best chance at getting immunity from prosecution, thanks to the longstanding legal practice of not prosecuting incumbent presidents. And there are good reasons to believe an indictment could help him in the GOP primary rather than hurt him.

One important difference between Trump and Netanyahu is that the former has always been willing to court chaos.

There was never a “cautious” Trump bounded by legal norms and niceties. Historically, his pattern has always been greater escalation when pressed — as we saw during the Mueller investigation, the first impeachment, and the 2020 election. If someone as calculating as Netanyahu can be pushed into anti-system radicalism by an indictment, what could happen with someone like Trump who is already willing to go to extremes?

The threat of political instability — even a constitutional crisis like the one looming in Israel — should not be used as a rationale to protect powerful politicians who engage in criminal wrongdoing. An Israeli refusal to indict Netanyahu would have sent a dangerous signal about what prime ministers can get away with in Israel — a green light for future leaders to attempt to engage in undemocratic behavior while in office.

If Alvin Bragg (or other prosecutors in Georgia and the Justice Department) sincerely believes that Trump engaged in prosecutable offenses, letting him slide because of who he is would send a similarly dangerous message about the state of the rule of law in America.

Malfeasance at the highest levels, then, puts highly polarized democracies in a lose-lose situation. Either legal authorities prosecute and risk a system-shaking political crisis, or ignore the offense and risk setting a precedent that encourages more subtle and gradual democratic erosion.