To pardon Netanyahu is to surrender Israel to Trump
There is a peculiar moment in the life of every democracy when the language of national healing begins to sound suspiciously more like the language of convenience, and Israel has certainly reached it. Netanyahu’s plea for a presidential pardon does raise the question: could pardoning the prime minister actually be good for the country, considering his government’s failings?
Supporters of clemency think so, and their case deserves to be taken seriously before it is dismantled. Their argument is not incoherent; after months of street protests and a war that has pushed Israeli society to all sorts of limits, the country is simply exhausted. The legal process against Netanyahu, sprawling against three separate corruption cases, continues to inflame national fracture lines, and, as the argument goes, a pardon would most definitely lower the national temperature by a few degrees. Proponents often point to past Israeli pardons – Moshe Katsav’s sentence being shortened, or the clemency granted in the aftermath of the Altalena affair – as proof that Israel has occasionally used forgiveness as a stabilising tool.
Israel is dependent on the United States in ways rarely admitted aloud, and this is the geopolitical dimension. With Trump back in the White House for his second term, and Netanyahu one of the few leaders with whom he enjoys a genuine rapport, the pro-pardon camp argues that granting this clemency will accelerate Washington-Jerusalem coordination, most especially at a time at which Israel can ill afford transatlantic cold fronts. Surely everything becomes smoother when egos are aligned and legal distractions are removed? Take, for example, the rapid alignment during Trump’s first term on issues like the Abraham Accords, the Golan Heights recognition, and the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem.
Thirdly is the legal process itself, being long, contested, and evidently endlessly procedural and bureaucratic, viewed by many as an administrative paralysis. These cases have dragged on for years, and even those sceptical of Netanyahu – I count myself among them – have been, however quietly, wondering whether it is healthy for a country to devote so much oxygen to the question of one man’s conduct in lieu of other, more pressing issues.
This is the argument at its strongest: a pardon becomes not an act of capitulation, but rather functions as something of a release valve for the wave of national anger. But reality, stubborn as ever, refuses to conform to this narrative, because every benefit promised by a pardon is little more than a mirage.
Pardoning Netanyahu will not simply end the division. It tells the millions of Israelis who marched for judicial integrity both before and after October 7th that the rules they fought for are negotiable. It establishes a two-tier system of justice, where the everyday individual will always come out worse: one system of justice for society’s powerful, those with friends in high places, and another for the rest. This is certainly not reconciliation; it smells more like moral and institutional resignation. When former prime minister Ehud Olmert served prison time for bribery, many Israelis saw it as proof that their system retained its spine.
Geopolitically, the promise of smoother relations with Washington is equally as illusory. Any pardon in response to Trump’s own urging does not strengthen Israel’s hand, but rather advertises its own weakness. It binds Israel to the whims of an American president who has never viewed alliances as partnerships, but as leverage points. Just look at Trump’s past ‘instructions’ to Israel: on Iran, Gaza and Syria. These are merely a preview of what a dependent Netanyahu would face under a dynamic such as the one Israel is approaching. One need only recall Trump’s public dressing-down of the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier this year in the White House, or his abrupt abandonment of the Kurds in Syria, to understand how easily he discards allies he believes to be indebted to him.
The idea that the country must ‘move on’ from this trial is one of the most fragile arguments of all here. Democracies do not move on by burying accountability. But the deepest flaw in the pro-pardon argument, indeed, is this: it imagines Netanyahu as some sort of universally unifying figure once absolved. History, though, suggests the opposite. Even before the war, he governed during the most polarising era in Israeli political life since the state’s founding. He narrowed Israel’s diplomatic image by tying it solely to the Republican ideals of the American right, and among diaspora Jews, he became a symbol of drift from democratic norms and the political centre. A pardon would not rehabilitate that image in any way, but simply serve to confirm it.
Democracy is never maintained by the ease of finding the most convenient way out, but by the courage to find the difficult, right way out instead. The difficult way, now as ever, is insisting that people in power answer to the law, rather than the other way around.
