Back in 2019, while serving as a deputy government minister, I was approached outside a Knesset meeting by Yossi Yona, a former philosophy professor and member of the opposition Labor Party who I’d come to admire. He told me that he had a great idea: that Benjamin Netanyahu should get a pardon in his corruption trial. Evoking the pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974, he argued that pardoning Netanyahu would allow Israeli society to finally move on from more than two decades of Bibi. “Once pardoned,” Yossi explained, “Netanyahu can retire from politics and Israel will be spared years of dangerous rifts. It’s time for the state to move on.”
I recalled Yona’s words this week as the embattled prime minister formally appealed for a pardon. In his appeal to Israel’s president Isaac Herzog, Netanyahu argued that while his personal interest would be best served with the trial running its course, it was time for the country to move on. Echoing a letter sent by President Donald Trump last month, Netanyahu said for the sake of Israel’s national unity, it was time to move on.
It feels like forever since my Knesset conversation with Yossi. The charges against the prime minister—for fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes—have gone to a trial dragging on for more than five years. The hearings have proceeded during the divisive struggles over the government’s judicial reform program and its refusal to draft ultra-Orthodox Jews, and for the last two years, in a war many Israelis regarded as existential. Throughout that conflict, perhaps absurdly, Netanyahu has been compelled to appear in court as frequently as three times per week and often for a full day.
For Netanyahu’s detractors, the trial represents a minimal comeuppance for a politician they view as irredeemably corrupt and corrosive to Israeli politics. For his supporters, the charges against Netanyahu are part of a protracted witch hunt waged by a dwindling liberal elite against the country’s most dynamic conservative leader who legitimately defeated them at the polls.