In March 2025, as the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, was investigating links between Qatar and some of his aides, Benjamin Netanyahu posted a message in English. It was addressed less to the citizens he governed than to an American political audience fluent in the same grievance. “The leftist Deep State,” he wrote, “weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will.”
Netanyahu was not then a suspect in that investigation. But he was already on trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. A sitting prime minister was telling two democracies that their justice systems were instruments of usurpation rather than forums of judgment.
The language was borrowed from Donald Trump. The method had long been Netanyahu’s own. Whenever an institution moves to judge him, he puts the institution on trial.
The most recent example came earlier this month. On July 5, in defiance of a High Court order, Netanyahu’s government declared that it would not recognize decisions made by the country’s TV and radio regulator. Eleven days later, in the final hours of its term, the Knesset—whose ruling coalition was led by Netanyahu’s Likud party—passed a law abolishing the regulator and replacing it with a new authority whose leadership the government would largely control. Netanyahu participated in the legislative debate, despite the fact that his bribery charge concerns alleged regulatory favors exchanged for favorable coverage. The July 5 declaration had not yet precipitated a full constitutional crisis, but it supplied the logic of one: when the court judged the government, the government claimed the right to judge the court.
Israel is now in an election campaign. The Knesset dissolved on July 17, after completing its first full, four-year term since 1988, and Israelis are scheduled to vote on October 27, in the first national election since the judicial upheaval of 2023 and Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on October 7. Successive polls place the parties of Netanyahu’s outgoing coalition below a governing majority, although his opponents have no certain path to power. The deeper question is whether electoral defeat would also discredit the political method he has normalized.
Netanyahu is commonly described as divisive. But division describes the effect, not the method. The sharper word is accusation. He turns every judgment against him into evidence of conspiracy and leaves the public unable to distinguish prosecution from persecution.
The pattern predates Netanyahu’s indictments. During the struggle over the Oslo Accords three decades ago, Netanyahu helped lead an opposition campaign that increasingly treated political disagreement as betrayal of the people. In October 1995, Netanyahu addressed a crowd at Jerusalem’s Zion Square where protesters called Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister at the time, a traitor and chanted “death to Rabin.” Photomontages of Rabin in an SS uniform circulated during protests that fall. Rabin was assassinated on November 4 by a right-wing opponent of the accords.
Netanyahu has always denied that his rhetoric during the campaign against the Oslo accords was intended to incite violence. But a politics of accusation does not require the leader to author every charge. It requires him to benefit from the atmosphere the charges create, and to let the boundary between opposition and treason dissolve. Two years later, as prime minister, Netanyahu was caught by an open microphone as he whispered to Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, “The left has forgotten what it means to be Jewish.” This was not a policy argument. It was an act of excommunication.
After Netanyahu was indicted in 2019, the same logic entered the courtroom. He denies the charges, as he is entitled to do. But his chosen defense has always been larger than legal denial. He and his defenders cast the police as fabricators; the attorney general who indicted him, his own appointee, as captive to the system; the courts as instruments of a coup; the press as propaganda; and the security chiefs as political actors. The chorus includes his son Yair, Likud ministers, sympathetic broadcasters, and online activists. Netanyahu need not utter every accusation himself. Israeli commentators call this ecosystem mekhonat ha-ra’al, the poison machine: a loose network that allows him to benefit from what others say aloud.
In 2023, the counter-prosecution became a program of government. Netanyahu’s coalition sought to reduce the Supreme Court’s power, alter the selection of judges, and limit the legal institutions capable of restraining the executive. Arguments could be made for rebalancing the court’s authority; Israelis had debated its reach for decades. The tell was scale, simultaneity, and authorship: so many restraints loosened at once, under a prime minister standing trial.
The result was civic rupture. Army reservists warned that they would not serve a dictatorship. Pilots and intelligence veterans signed letters. Former security officials treated social cohesion as a strategic asset under assault. The court, the attorney general, the general staff, the security service, and the press were recast as conspirators.
Accusation alone, however, does not explain Netanyahu’s endurance. His rule offered Israelis a bargain. They were told that Hamas could be deterred, that the conflict could be managed indefinitely, that normalization with distant Arab states could bypass the Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation, that prosperity could substitute for political settlement. What was sold as vigilance became permission not to see.
On October 7, 2023, that bargain collapsed. About 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage. The doctrine Israelis call “the conception,” the belief that Hamas had been deterred and could be contained, burned with the kibbutzim and the music festival. The man who had promised mastery delivered exposure.
Even then, accusation moved faster than accountability. In the early hours of October 29, Netanyahu posted that the heads of military intelligence and the Shin Bet had never warned him of Hamas’s war intentions and had instead assured him that the organization was deterred. Hours later, amid criticism that he was shifting blame while the war was still unfolding, he deleted the post and apologized. It was later revealed that he had received warnings that Israel’s deterrence was eroding and the danger of attack was rising (although no public evidence has established that he was specifically warned of the October 7 assault). The deletion could not erase the reflex the post revealed: to assign blame before accepting responsibility.
The same method explains his resistance to an independent state commission of inquiry. After the 1973 war came the Agranat Commission; after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the Kahan Commission. In each case, the government established a state commission, but the president of the Supreme Court appointed its members. After October 7, Netanyahu’s coalition instead advanced legislation to create a commission whose members would be selected through a political process.
The bill passed only the first of three required readings before the Knesset dissolved; no commission was created.
The catastrophe of October 7 had many authors; an independent state commission would name them all. That is both its democratic purpose and what makes it threatening to a politics organized around counter-accusation. A commission of inquiry turns accusation into judgment. It gives fury a room, evidence a sequence, and blame a public test. The accuser cannot easily submit to judges he did not choose.
The charges against Netanyahu concern conduct that can seem petty beside the national crises he has helped create: accepting cigars and champagne from wealthy benefactors and using public power to secure favorable media coverage. But the smallness of the appetites does not diminish the scale of the damage; it exposes the private interests beneath the public crusade. Netanyahu presents himself as a statesman acting on behalf of Jewish history, while the trial—now in its sixth year, with likely two more to go—depicts a politician repeatedly bending public office toward personal advantage. His private interests become national causes, and institutions that threaten them become enemies of the people.
Still, the accusation must return to the accuser. What would acquit him?
The tempting answer is nothing. That answer must be refused. If nothing could acquit Netanyahu, the argument would become theological, a claim about essence rather than conduct. A secular argument knows only sequence, choice, and repetition. There were exits: retirement after losing power in 2021; a plea agreement that would have required his withdrawal from politics; acceptance of an independent state commission after October 7; a pardon accompanied by an acknowledgment of responsibility. More fundamentally, there was always the possibility of submitting to judgments not of his own making. He rejected or evaded every exit that required him to relinquish power, accept responsibility, or recognize an authority he did not control. The pattern is accumulation, not essence. At every available exit, he chose accusation.
The method is not confined to Israel. Netanyahu took the Deep State from Trump’s lexicon; Trump has returned the favor, calling Netanyahu’s prosecution a political witch hunt and writing to Israel’s president to urge a pardon. Their alliance is more than strategic or personal. Each ratifies the other’s account of democratic institutions: Courts do not judge leaders; they persecute them. Investigations do not establish facts; they manufacture conspiracies. Defeat does not withdraw authority; it proves betrayal.
That is why even an electoral defeat in October would not settle the question posed by Netanyahu’s politics. A leader may lose while his method survives him. Institutions can remain standing after the public has been taught to see every judgment as partisan, every finding as fabricated, and every restraint as an enemy act.
The remedy is defense: judges still judging, reporters still documenting, civil servants still upholding procedure under pressure, families still demanding an accounting, citizens still insisting that accusation must answer to evidence. Let accusation be silenced, and let the defense be heard.
