Many Americans will be asking themselves this weekend how the indictment of former President Donald Trump will influence their country’s future. Will he remain one of the two main candidates for the
Many Americans will be asking themselves this weekend how the indictment of former President Donald Trump will influence their country’s future. Will he remain one of the two main candidates for the presidency in 2024? They might cast their gaze eastward, to Israel and its own criminal defendant-in-chief, Trump’s good buddy Benjamin Netanyahu.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, of course, is on trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, in three different cases. One involves allegedly receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts from favor-seeking billionaires. Another involves alleged skullduggery with Israel’s main publisher. A third involves alleged major regulatory favors to the owner of a major website in exchange for favorable coverage.
The charges had been brewing since late 2016, and in December 2018 the state prosecution recommended indictment. By that point Netanyahu was facing a reelection vote a few months down the line, and there was quite a to-do about how that should affect the criminal proceedings.
Netanyahu immediately claimed the charges were politically motivated – a move that Trump might approve of. Many of his acolytes in the media and the political scene flooded the discourse with a narrative involving a shadowy cabal who cannot brook conservatives in power.
In February 2019, two months before the election, the Supreme Court rejected a petition by Netanyahu’s Likud Party to stall the proceedings. The attorney general then announced that he had accepted the recommendations to indict “pending a hearing” that would happen months down the road. That basically meant that Netanyahu would be indicted. And sure enough, he has been.
That created a real precedent and raised two massive questions for Israelis.
