A Pardon Israel Cannot Afford
Israel faces a constitutional test: Will presidential clemency become a tool for political survival?
On November 30, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally requested a presidential pardon from President Isaac Herzog. This is not an act of reconciliation. It is an attempt to halt a criminal trial midstream and turn a safeguard of justice into a political escape hatch. Under Israel’s Basic Law: The President, the president’s pardon power is broad—but it was designed to serve justice after a legal process concludes, not to pre-empt one.
Netanyahu’s supporters invoke the Bus 300 affair, when President Chaim Herzog pardoned Shin Bet operatives involved in extrajudicial killings and perjury. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in Barzilai v. Government of Israel, but decades of legal scholarship agree: Bus 300 was a constitutional aberration, driven by political pressure, not a principled precedent.¹ ² ³ ⁴ Even those who defended Herzog acknowledged that the decision strained democratic norms. Today, the case is cited only by those hoping to normalize an exception the legal community has long rejected.
And the analogy collapses on the facts. Bus 300 was a national-security scandal. Netanyahu’s charges, including illicit gifts, regulatory manipulation, breach of trust, are acts of personal corruption, documented in The Times of Israel’s trial reports and in the public indictments. Shin Bet leaders ultimately accepted responsibility and stepped aside. Netanyahu has stayed in office, attacked law enforcement, delegitimized prosecutors and judges, and now seeks clemency not from remorse but from necessity.
This request comes in the long shadow of October 7, 2023, Israel’s gravest security failure. Analyses by the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), reporting by Amos Harel in Haaretz, and investigations published by The Washington Post all document systemic failures in preparedness and leadership. Senior IDF commanders accepted responsibility. Netanyahu has not. He continues to resist a fully independent state commission of inquiry. If soldiers and civil servants are held accountable, why should the prime minister escape scrutiny?
Even in Barzilai, the Court’s reasoning emphasized that clemency must not short-circuit judicial authority.⁵ Research by the Israel Democracy Institute shows that Israeli pardons overwhelmingly occur after conviction, typically involving remorse, rehabilitation, or humanitarian need—not serving politicians trying to dodge a verdict. Pardon policy in Israel has never functioned as a mechanism for elected leaders to erase their own criminal exposure.
President Herzog now faces a constitutional crossroads. His father’s 1986 decision is part of Israel’s institutional memory—but its lesson is caution, not duplication. Clemency extended to the powerful at the expense of the rule of law corrodes public trust, weakens democratic norms, and creates a hierarchy of accountability no democracy can tolerate. Netanyahu’s request seeks to place the prime minister above the law. A functioning democracy cannot allow that. Israel’s future, its credibility, its institutions, its public faith, depends on rejecting the idea that power grants immunity.
The president must affirm a principle more fundamental than any political calculation: in Israel, no one is beyond the reach of the law.
_________
¹ Pnina Lahav, “A Barrel Without Hoops: The Impact of Counterterrorism on Israel’s Legal Culture,” Cardozo Law Review (1988).
² Mordechai Kremnitzer, analyses on executive power and clemency, Israel Democracy Institute.
³ Aeyal Gross, “Human Rights, Terrorism and the Israeli Supreme Court,”
⁴ Amnon Rubinstein & Barak Medina, The Constitutional Law of the State of Israel.
⁵ Barzilai v. Government of Israel, HCJ 428/86 (1986).
