Not Justice at Any Cost: Why Israel Needs a ‘Graduated Pardon’ Framework

Three weeks after proposing a conditional pardon, it now appears that a more effective and responsible framework is emerging from the President’s Residence.

Three weeks ago, I published an article in the Times of Israel arguing that a conditional pardon could help stabilize Israel’s political–legal crisis and begin healing its deep social divide. Today, a more refined idea is emerging – a graduated pardon framework – one that offers a clearer constitutional path, preserves legal responsibility, and provides Israel with a realistic way out of its spiraling conflict.

The debate around the prime minister’s request for a pardon is not merely a legal dispute; it is a struggle over the character of the state. At its core lies a nearly existential question: must the legal process be carried out at any cost, even when it has become one of the deepest fault lines in Israeli society, and when more years of testimony and political warfare will bring no healing?

Opponents of delaying the proceedings often speak from genuine concern for democracy, but their position rests on a form of moral absolutism – the belief that justice is an unconditional duty, independent of context, and that no step in the process may be paused even if its continuation threatens the state’s stability. This stance echoes a simplified, and ultimately misleading, reading of Kant: a belief that the law must be executed even if society collapses around it.

But this interpretation misunderstands Kant entirely. He never suggested that a legal process should continue when doing so destroys the conditions that make law meaningful. His idea of moral duty presupposes a functioning civic order – not a society in which the legal process itself becomes a generator of mistrust, polarization, and institutional exhaustion. Israel today does not resemble the calm moral universe required for such absolutism. Netanyahu’s trial has become a symbolic battlefield. For some, it is the last safeguard of democracy; for others, proof of bias within the justice system. Under such conditions, insisting on “justice at any cost” does not defend the rule of law – it erodes it.

One need not turn to philosophical texts to see this. The clearest place to look is the Israeli ethos of solidarity. Time and again, Israel has chosen to rescue its citizens even at a high price, releasing prisoners – including those convicted of severe crimes – to bring kidnapped Israelis home. This is not because the state dismisses justice, but because it recognizes moments in which the basic survival of society outweighs the strict application of law. The state exists to protect human beings, not sacrifice them on the altar of principle.

True rule of law requires stability, basic public trust, and institutions capable of functioning without constant upheaval. When half the public sees the trial as persecution and the other half sees any delay as betrayal, the legal process cannot fulfill its purpose. It loses its legitimacy and its integrative power. Under such conditions, insisting on the proceedings is not protection of the legal system – it is an assault on it.

This is where the President’s emerging initiative enters. One need not embrace every detail to appreciate the intent: preventing the legal–political crisis from becoming irreversible. According to reporting by Moshe Klughaft in Israel Hayom, the informal discussions include not only suspension of the proceedings but also the possibility of a full pardon, as part of a broader national arrangement that may include establishing a state commission of inquiry. Such a mechanism would allow Israel to transform a painful chapter into institutional reflection rather than ongoing chaos.

The President’s framework seeks to balance responsibility with preventing collapse. It allows society to begin healing while preserving legal accountability. It attempts to position itself between rigid formalism and total waiver, between an impossible legal verdict and an unthinkable blanket pardon.

The first component is suspension of the trial – not erasure, not distortion of evidentiary rules, and not a declaration of innocence. A temporary pause allows the state to function without the trial choking its public and political life. Suspension does not cancel responsibility; it postpones the decision to a moment when society can bear it, ideally after the prime minister’s clear and obligatory retirement from political life. In this sense, suspension within the graduated model remains more faithful to Kant’s spirit than insisting on exhausting the legal process precisely when society is least able to absorb it.

The second component is limiting the tenure of the prime minister by Basic Law. Term limits clarify that no individual is more identified with the state than the state itself and that no office is indefinite. This is not a personal measure but an institutional correction that restores balance between the rule of law and effective governance. Once everyone understands that a leader’s term is final, political tensions ease, and politics ceases to revolve around one man’s fate.

The third component is natural retirement – not coercion or political bargaining. Retirement at the end of a final term allows the country to regain stability, the legal process to be reset, and society to view the transition not as rupture but as the end of a cycle. Only then can the possibility of resuming proceedings or considering a pardon be weighed, never during the term itself.

Together, these three components restore the perspective the current debate lacks. They preserve responsibility without insisting on its immediate execution at a moment of maximal instability. They create a path between extreme formalism and total waiver, between rigid insistence and reckless abandonment. They express a simple truth: sometimes preserving a principle requires postponing its implementation.

Thus the graduated pardon framework emerges not as an act of grace toward the prime minister but as an act of repair for a fractured nation. Not as abandonment of justice but as a defense of the possibility that justice may exist in the future. Not as surrender to politics but as a moral understanding: a state does not destroy itself to preserve a process; it preserves itself so that the process may continue.

Israel’s choice today is not between trial and pardon. It is between disintegration and repair. Between rigidity posing as principle and principle shaped by reality. The duty is not to pursue the legal process at any cost; it is to preserve the society in which the law can live. A graduated pardon is not abandonment of the law – it is a restoration of the law to its rightful role: serving the state, not consuming it.

If Israel is to emerge from this crisis, it must let go of fantasies of pure justice and return to what has always sustained it: mutual responsibility, moral realism, and the recognition that there is no justice without society and no law without a state capable of standing.