The Unraveling of Governance: Israel’s Corruption-Driven Capitulation

In the theater of modern governance, Israel’s ruling coalition has become less a cabinet than a confederacy of self-preservationists, less a government than a syndicate of political expediency. The Likud party, once a vessel of national resilience and conservative principle, now functions as a scaffold for the self-interested, a host body hollowed out by the parasites of corruption and clerical coercion.

At the apex of this decay stands Benjamin Netanyahu—a man for whom longevity in office has become the sole organizing principle of statecraft. His legal entanglements—ranging from bribery to breach of trust—have transformed governance into a courtroom drama, and the state into collateral damage. But Netanyahu is not the disease; he is the symptom of a larger pathology.

The rot runs through the ranks: Aryeh Deri, twice convicted, remains a ministerial powerbroker; David Amsalem, the avatar of cronyism, oversees portfolios as if they were personal estates. Haim Katz, indicted for insider trading, embodies the casual fusion of private gain and public duty. Miri Regev, whose ministry oozes with allegations of politicization, and Tally Gotliv, whose ethical breaches seem less an aberration than a job requirement, fill out this rogues’ gallery. It is not a cabinet—it is an indictment waiting to be unsealed.

But the heart of the matter lies in the coalition’s Faustian bargain with the Haredi parties. This is not pluralism; it is patronage. The demands are familiar: exemption from military service, expanded budgets for religious institutions, unchecked control over education. What is new is the brazen ease with which Likud complies—not from necessity, but from mutually assured corruption. The Haredi parties provide political cover, and in return, receive immunity from national responsibility. It is a compact not of power-sharing, but of power-shirking.

Yet the most enduring damage is being inflicted not upon budgets or policies, but upon the very architecture of Israeli democracy—its institutions.

The consequences, alas, have not gone entirely unnoticed—though they are routinely ignored. When then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a career military man, dared suggest that dismantling the judiciary might also dismantle military cohesion, he was summarily fired. Then, in a fitting twist of Israeli farce, he was un-fired, not out of contrition but because the government belatedly realized that even purges require adults in the room. Gallant’s sin? Declaring, with intolerable clarity, that “the rift within our society is widening and penetrating the IDF.” For this act of candor, he was cast out like a whistleblower at a kleptocrats’ convention.

Meanwhile, the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet, whose job is to thwart enemies foreign, have felt compelled to murmur their unease. Ronen Bar, director of Shin Bet, warned that “internal polarization is becoming a national security threat.” For this, he was repaid not with gratitude, but with insinuation and summarily dismissed. Ministers once deferential to the security establishment now deride it with the swagger of adolescents rebelling against their headmasters. Minister David Amsalem, whose legal insights are roughly commensurate with his ethics, declared that “the Shin Bet is not above criticism,” before hinting that perhaps it ought to be put in its place. Justice Minister Yariv Levin, when not dismantling the judiciary brick by constitutional brick, opined that “the High Court is a political actor in robes,” as if impartiality were an elaborate ruse.

And then there is Simcha Rothman, self-styled constitutional visionary, who insisted that “judges are no more qualified to determine what is reasonable than the average Knesset member”—a sentiment that might hold water, were the average Knesset member not, in this coalition, under indictment or ideological quarantine.

In sum, the guardians of law and security are now treated as subversives, while the architects of this legal auto-da-fé parade as patriots. One might be forgiven for mistaking this coalition for a satire—until one remembers it is also, terrifyingly, a government.

Likud, once the steward of Zionism’s pragmatic center-right, now presides over a polity where law is negotiable, service is optional, and institutions are disposable. The result is not governance, but its grotesque parody.

A polity cannot be both democratic and indifferent to the decay of its institutions. And so Israel approaches a reckoning: not just of leadership, but of identity. Will it remain a liberal democracy animated by the rule of law? Or devolve into a brittle coalition where the law is but an inconvenience to be revised?

In its present course, the answer darkens by the day.