Binyamin Netanyahu likens himself to Donald Trump

It was a particularly frustrating day for Israel’s prime minister. On the morning of March 3rd Binyamin Netanyahu took the stand in his long-running trial for alleged corruption. In the afternoon he had to respond in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to the opposition’s demand for a commission of inquiry into Hamas’s attacks of October 2023. Angrily rejecting all the charges, he accused the heads of Israel’s intelligence services of belonging to a “junta” against him. “The co-operation between the deep state in the bureaucracy and the media failed in the United States and won’t succeed here,” he declared.

Even for the combative prime minister, this is an escalation of his attacks on his own country’s officials. More recently, spurred by the example of Donald Trump replacing America’s security and defence leadership with loyalists, he has gone on the warpath himself. But he lacks the American president’s powers to hire and fire. Israel’s top jobs are reviewed by civil-service committees and can be petitioned against in the Supreme Court.

Moreover, the members of an Israeli national commission of inquiry must be chosen by the president of the Supreme Court. Rather than submit to scrutiny and account for his long-held strategy to “contain” Hamas in Gaza, Mr Netanyahu has steadfastly tried to pin the blame for October 7th entirely on the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and Shin Bet, the domestic security service. Since the attack, the military and security chiefs have clashed with him over the lack of a strategic “day-after” plan for Gaza and for his failure to prioritise a deal with Hamas to free the Israeli hostages, a plan Mr Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners have opposed.

In any case, American officials are now bypassing Israel and talking directly with Hamas in Qatar, with a view to finding a way to end the war in Gaza. If this succeeds, it could well spell an end to Mr Netanyahu’s coalition government and pave the way to the reckoning he has been so anxious to avoid with the Israeli people at the ballot box.

On March 5th Mr Netanyahu partially got his way when the IDF chief of staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, who took full responsibility for the army’s failings on October 7th, stepped down. His replacement is a gruff tank commander, Eyal Zamir, who Mr Netanyahu hopes will be more pliant. One of the general’s first actions was to replace the IDF spokesman, Rear-Admiral Daniel Hagari, who had openly criticised government policy.

But Mr Netanyahu is having less success shifting two other senior people: Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, and Gali Baharav-Miara, the attorney-general. Both were appointed to fixed terms by the previous government; replacing them is technically possible but legally fraught.

Firing those two troublesome officials has become even more sensitive now that they have ordered an investigation into allegations that a number of Mr Netanyahu’s advisers have received payments from the Qatari government, which has been involved in negotiations over Gaza.

Ms Baharav-Miara has repeatedly clashed with the government by opposing its attempts to weaken the Supreme Court. And she is demanding that the IDF comply with the court’s rulings to end the exemption of religious seminary students from compulsory military service. But calling them up could jeopardise Mr Netanyahu’s coalition, since the ultra-Orthodox parties, who say these young men must be allowed to continue studying Torah during wartime, are a key element in it.

These clashes between the prime minister and senior officialdom have featured in all of Mr Netanyahu’s governments. As far back as his first term in office, in 1997, he was investigated by police for allegedly trying to appoint an attorney-general who was thought likely to have quashed charges against his political allies. Over a quarter of a century later, when asked to be brief in his testimony in a court session on March 12th, he burst out at the judges: “My family and I have been passed through the gates of hell!” ■

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