Netanyahu’s Pardon Request: Are Israelis Still Citizens – Or Already Subjects?
«Je suis le roi Ubu, je fais ce que je veux, et ce que je fais est bien parce que c’est moi qui le fais.»
Alfred Jarry, Ubu roi
Netanyahu’s Pardon Request: Are Israelis Still Citizens – Or Already Subjects?
There is something almost ghostly about Benjamin Netanyahu’s request for a presidential pardon before his corruption trial has even ended. It feels less like a legal move and more like the final act in a slow constitutional haunting. We know this script from other damaged democracies: the leader casts himself as the victim of a corrupt “system,” demands personal immunity in the name of “national unity,” and forces the head of state to choose between loyalty to the law and loyalty to the ruler.
In Israel, a pre-conviction pardon is not a routine instrument. It is an extreme exception, invoked only in the rarest of circumstances and never for a politician who refuses to admit guilt, show remorse, or assume responsibility for years of attacks on the police, prosecutors and courts. Granting such a pardon now would not be a technical adjustment to an overloaded legal machine. It would be a constitutional verdict on reality itself: that the institutions which investigated and indicted the prime minister are the true offenders, and that the only genuine victim is the man who has spent years at the apex of power.
The language of Netanyahu’s request is therefore not decoration; it is the message. It speaks of “national reconciliation,” “healing the rifts,” “lowering the flames” – while insisting in the same breath that the investigations were “extraordinary,” “illegal,” and politically motivated. Reconciliation, yes, but only on condition that the state confesses to persecuting him. The proposed “healing” is an exchange: peace in return for delegitimizing the entire enforcement system. This is not an olive branch. It is a demand for an official confession of guilt by the institutions of law.
In a rule-of-law democracy, clemency is a narrow, carefully fenced instrument. It comes after conviction, once the facts have been established in court, and usually only after the convicted person has at least acknowledged what they have done. It is not a private emergency exit built into the constitution so that the leader can walk out of the legal process at the precise moment a binding verdict comes into view. It is certainly not meant for someone who continues to play the role of Israel’s Alfred Dreyfus – entirely innocent, cruelly framed, and exempt from any obligation to respect the court’s authority.
This is where the Israeli case intersects with a wider, disturbing pattern. In Hungary under Orbán, in Poland under PiS, and in the United States under Donald Trump, we have seen the same mutation: formal democratic institutions survive on paper, but a new political theology silently takes over. The leader is perpetually under siege from shadowy “elites.” The courts are “politicized.” The media are “enemies of the people.” Every indictment becomes proof of conspiracy. Law does not vanish overnight. It is hollowed out, converted into a one-way weapon: sharp against enemies, blunt against those who control the state.
The American rehearsal: Trump and the politics of the “witch hunt”
The Trump years made this logic painfully explicit. Confronted with investigation after investigation, Donald Trump did not say, “I will stand trial to clear my name and prove that the system works.” Instead, he turned every legal proceeding into a plebiscite on himself. Prosecutors were “thugs,” judges were “biased,” entire cases were framed as “election interference” or “deep state coups.” The law was acceptable only as long as it could be bent.
His favorite magic formula, repeated obsessively, captured the whole strategy: “End the witch hunt.” The Russia investigation was a “witch hunt.” The impeachment proceedings were a “witch hunt.” Criminal indictments became “the greatest witch hunt in American history.” By calling every attempt at accountability a witch hunt, Trump did something very precise: he redefined the category of law itself. A legal process that touches him is not a neutral procedure; it is by definition persecution. A legal process that targets his enemies, on the other hand, is simply justice.
The deeper danger was not one dramatic confrontation but gradual habituation. Each escalation in rhetoric, each attack on an institution, was eventually absorbed. The question slowly shifted from “Is this legal?” to “Can anyone actually stop him?” That is the quiet moment when citizens start to feel less like rights-bearing individuals and more like spectators in a game played over their heads. The law still exists in the text of the constitution, but its application becomes a matter of political taste.
Trump’s use of the pardon power was a textbook demonstration of this feudal drift. Clemency was not a sober, rare correction of injustice; it became a personal instrument of reward and protection for loyalists caught in the legal net. People convicted of lying to investigators, obstructing justice or otherwise interfering on his behalf received presidential mercy. The message was brutally simple: loyalty to the leader may count for more than loyalty to the law. A constitutional power meant to humanize justice was dragged down to the level of court favor.
Seen from this angle, Netanyahu’s request for a pre-emptive pardon looks less like a uniquely Israeli drama and more like a local variation on the same code. Trump wanted the courts to recognize that he is not like other defendants, that his office and his following entitle him to a special lane. Netanyahu’s move is structurally identical. He does not say, “I violated the rules and now throw myself on the mercy of the president.” He says, “I did nothing wrong; the process itself was an abuse; now the president must rescue me so the nation can move on.” In both cases, the legal system is turned into the culprit, the leader becomes the injured party, and clemency becomes a tool for undoing the very idea of equal accountability.
The Brazilian mirror: Bolsonaro and the export model of impunity
If Trump was the loud American rehearsal of impunity, Jair Bolsonaro has been its Latin American export model. Here too we see the same structure: a leader who insists that the normal rules do not really apply to him, that investigations, trials and institutional constraints are insults rather than obligations.
The pattern is almost geometrically clean. First, delegitimize any election that produces an unwanted result. Second, encourage or at least tolerate an assault on democratic institutions – in Washington on January 6, in Brasília on January 8. Third, when the legal system finally responds, claim persecution and demand special treatment on the grounds of past service, popular support, or “defence of the nation.” At each step, the leader moves a little further outside the circle in which everyone else is still supposed to stand.
Bolsonaro’s appeal to Trump is more than a gesture of ideological sympathy. It is an import license for a particular political theology: the belief that leaders who embody “the people” cannot, by definition, truly break the law. If such a leader is investigated, it is the investigation that is illegitimate. If he is prosecuted, it is the prosecution that must be stopped. The slogan of the “witch hunt” travels easily; the structure of impunity is perfectly portable. Washington, Brasília and Jerusalem are not identical, but the message is the same: the legal order is advisory for those at the top, mandatory for everyone else.
It is tempting, especially for comfortable commentators, to retreat into the language of “different contexts” and “different traditions.” But this is exactly how the problem is neutralized and made to look vague. What matters is not the national costume; what matters is the form of the move. In all three cases, a leader under investigation demands to be treated as a category of one. Institutions are pressured to accept that this one man stands in a zone where law must bend.
Once this move is accepted, it is never truly undone. An exception is not a harmless one-off deviation. An exception is a procedure. And a procedure, once established, does not disappear. It remains in the system like a hidden protocol, available for reactivation, refinement and normalization. You do not “reset” such an exception. You live with it – and future rulers learn very quickly how to use it.
Back to Jerusalem: what Herzog is really being asked to do
Seen in this wider light, Netanyahu’s pardon request is not an isolated legal curiosity. It is a bid to install the same operating system of impunity that we have watched in action elsewhere. If President Isaac Herzog accepts the structure of this request, he will not simply be shortening a trial. He will be rewriting the basic story Israel tells itself about how power is constrained.
He would be declaring, in effect, that the law is optional for the most powerful man in the country, and obligatory only for everyone else. That is the moment when a democracy quietly changes its inner code: from citizens who live under common rules to subjects who live under the shadow of a ruler’s exception. The constitution may remain untouched on paper, but its meaning has shifted from “no one above the law” to “some people above consequences.”
Supporters of a pardon will insist that Israel is at war, that the country is exhausted and fractured, and that “national unity” demands a grand gesture to put years of legal and political conflict behind it. But it is precisely in war and trauma that institutions are tested. If the legal system bends now to accommodate the needs of a single individual, it will not automatically straighten itself when the emergency is declared over. Precedents born in crisis are not buried with the crisis. They become the skeleton of the next “normal.”
Others will point to Netanyahu’s long years of service, his international achievements, his role in safeguarding Israel’s security. Such arguments may have weight when a court considers sentencing after a conviction, or when a conventional pardon is discussed once the legal process has run its full course. They cannot replace that process. “Great service to the nation” is not an amulet against the consequences of corruption. If it becomes one, every future prime minister will learn the essential lesson of the new order: accumulate enough symbolic capital and you will never have to stand fully under the law.
Even the Bus 300 precedent, now treated by Netanyahu’s lawyers as a sacred talisman, points in the opposite direction. Its logic was simple: a person who comes to the president and says, “I committed an offense; I ask for a pardon,” can be treated as an “offender” even before a formal conviction. It did not imagine a scenario in which a leader insists that he may not have done anything wrong at all, yet demands a pardon anyway – just in case. A hypothetical, pre-emptive pardon for a man who denies any responsibility is not an act of mercy. It is the constitutional codification of impunity.
There is also the symbolic layer, which is not a luxury here but the core of the matter. The president of Israel is not a monarch. He does not dispense royal grace to favorites who stand above the law. In a democracy, the president is the guardian of a simple story: that no one – not even the most charismatic and longest-serving leader – is bigger than the rules that bind the community together. If the president uses his authority to confirm that the law can be switched off for one man, he converts his office into an instrument of feudal power. The presidential seal ceases to represent the people’s sovereignty and becomes a rubber stamp for personal immunity.
A question without comfort
By the time a democracy reaches the stage where Netanyahu asks for a pre-emptive pardon, Trump demands effective immunity, and Bolsonaro presents himself as a persecuted savior who deserves protection from the courts, the reassuring, binary question “Are we still a democracy?” is no longer adequate. The harsher question is this: How much of our democracy has already been converted into a carefully legalized feudal order – and how much of that conversion are we prepared to ratify?
If we accept that leaders may place themselves above the law “just this once,” we are not resolving a crisis. We are installing an update to the system – an irreversible one. From that moment on, every future ruler knows that there exists a hidden protocol for personal impunity. No constitution, however beautifully written, is stronger than the procedures we allow to run in the background.
If the answer to this is no – if Israelis do not want to live in a state where the prime minister is, in practice, beyond the reach of the courts – then the answer to the current pardon request must also be no.
No, because genuine reconciliation cannot be built on the demolition of public trust in the justice system.
No, because the rule of law cannot survive once a leader is allowed to short-circuit his own trial by presidential grace.
No, because citizens who accept a pre-conviction pardon for a leader who admits nothing and blames everyone else are no longer citizens in the full sense. They become subjects in a new, meticulously legalized feudal order.
Mr. President, this is your line in the sand. If you cross it, it will not only be Benjamin Netanyahu who is pardoned. What will be quietly forgiven is the end of the basic promise that in Israel, even the prime minister must stand before the law like everyone else.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
