When Power Learns to Profit from War
There is a moment when corruption stops being a scandal and becomes a form of government.
It does not always arrive with bags of cash, crude threats, or theatrical criminality. More often, it arrives through proximity: a chief of staff, an adviser, a loyal aide, a family business, a discreet investor, a friendly media channel, a conveniently blurred boundary between public office and private advantage. The old word for this was court. The modern word is administration. The mechanism is the same.
The reported move by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to indict Tzachi Braverman, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for obstruction of justice and fraud and breach of trust, pending a hearing, should therefore not be treated as an isolated legal episode. It belongs to a much larger political pathology. The affair concerns an investigation into an alleged leak of classified documents, including material reportedly passed to foreign media. Legally, these are suspicions and prospective charges, not convictions. Politically, however, the pattern is already visible: the inner circle of power appears again as a zone where loyalty to the ruler may become more important than loyalty to the state.
This is where Israel should look across the ocean — not because America explains Israel, but because the Trump orbit has become one of the most advanced contemporary laboratories of this disease.
Around Donald Trump, the boundary between public office and private enrichment has long been systematically blurred. Recent financial disclosures revealed thousands of stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million, involving companies directly affected by administration policy. The Trump Organization says investment decisions are handled by third parties, without involvement by Trump or his family. That qualification matters. But formal distance is not the same as political cleanliness. A system can be legally insulated and morally rotten at the same time.
Then come social media, cryptocurrency, real estate, foreign business projects, and the recurring question of where private interest ends and state policy begins. Reuters has reported conflict-of-interest concerns over Trump’s business ventures, including cryptocurrency and Truth Social. The Guardian has reported on a Trump Tower project in Georgia that raises questions about the intersection of business interests, sanctions, political influence, and the symbolic value of the Trump name. One does not need to claim that every such case is a crime. It is enough to see the mechanism: public office becomes a surface on which private advantage can begin to look politically normal.
That is the real lesson. The danger is not that Israeli officials are copying Trump’s hairstyle, slogans, or vulgar charisma. The danger is that they may be learning the deeper technique: convert public office into a shield, convert investigation into persecution, convert loyalty into immunity, convert national crisis into opportunity.
And here one must speak plainly. People are dying. Soldiers are dying. Hostages have lived or died under conditions of unimaginable violence. Families have been shattered. Civilians have been displaced, traumatized, and left waiting for decisions made by people who often speak of sacrifice from behind layers of protection. In such a moment, any enrichment, any manipulation of classified material, any obstruction of justice, any private advantage extracted from public catastrophe is not merely corruption. It is obscene.
There is a special ugliness in wartime corruption. In ordinary times, corruption steals money, trust, and institutional coherence. In wartime, it steals meaning from the dead. It turns sacrifice into cover. It allows officials and courtiers to wrap themselves in national emergency while treating that emergency as a private membrane of protection.
That is why the issue is not sidelocks or no sidelocks, kippah or no kippah, religious camp or secular camp. Corruption has no theology. It can wear a black hat, a knitted kippah, a tailored suit, or an American flag pin. The costume changes; the mechanism persists. The question is whether the person near power still recognizes a boundary between service and possession.
A state begins to decay when its officials no longer ask, “What does the law require of me?” but “How close am I to the person who can make consequences disappear?”
That is the court logic. It is older than modern democracy and more resilient than ideology. Every ruler’s circle produces people who begin to believe that proximity to command gives them a higher status than ordinary citizens, judges, investigators, soldiers, bereaved families, and the inconvenient public. They do not always say this openly. They express it procedurally: delay, conceal, leak, obstruct, attack investigators, delegitimize prosecutors, invoke emergency, accuse critics of treason, and pretend that accountability is a weapon of the enemy.
Trump’s America has shown how effective this script can be. Israel now faces its own version of the same test.
The test is not whether one loves or hates Netanyahu. That frame is already too degraded. The real test is whether the state still possesses institutions capable of saying no to the inner circle of power. Not to the opposition. Not to protesters. Not to journalists. To the people closest to executive authority.
If they cannot be investigated, there is no rule of law.
If they cannot be charged, there is no equality before the law.
If they can profit while others bury their children, there is no public morality left — only a court surrounded by flags.
Israel does not need another sermon about unity. Unity without accountability is only silence with patriotic decoration. Nor does it need another theatrical war between “the people” and “the elites.” That language has become the preferred camouflage of elites who discovered that the best way to protect privilege is to accuse institutions of privilege.
What is needed is a colder and simpler sentence: no one becomes more innocent because he stands closer to power.
And it is not enough to watch power’s hands. One must also look into its pockets.
Especially when it hides behind war, security, religion, nation, or loyalty. Where others lose their lives, homes, children, and futures, every private gain by people gathered around the center of decision must be treated not as a detail, but as evidence of political degradation.
That sentence should be obvious. The fact that it must be said is already an indictment of the present political moment.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
