Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Thursday that there should be a plea deal in the criminal trial against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the day after U.S. President Donald Trump said the case was a “ridiculous witch hunt against their great wartime prime minister.”
“Bibi and I just went through hell together, fighting a very tough and brilliant longtime enemy of Israel, Iran, and Bibi could not have been better, sharper or stronger in his love for the incredible Holy Land,” Trump stated. “Bibi Netanyahu was a warrior, like perhaps no other warrior in the history of Israel.”
Trump added that the corruption trial is “politically motivated” and “should be canceled immediately or a pardon given to a great hero, who has done so much for the state.”
“It was the United States of America that saved Israel, and now it is going to be the United States of America that saves Bibi Netanyahu,” added the president.
U.S. experts who spoke to JNS are divided on the degree to which Trump’s statement on domestic Israeli politics was appropriate.
“There is no precedent for a U.S. president attempting to intervene in another country’s legal process,” Dan Schnur, who lectures on political communications at Pepperdine University, the University of Southern California and the University of California, Berkeley, told JNS. “Trump’s call says more about his newly rediscovered value of Netanyahu’s partnership than about the trial or its outcome.”
The U.S. president “now sees Iran as an immense triumph for him, and he knows that it would not have happened if Netanyahu had not forced his hand,” Schnur told JNS. “This was his way of saying ‘thank you.’”
Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS that Trump “seems to be well-intentioned, sympathizing with Netanyahu based on Trump’s personal experience with what appeared to be political prosecutions.”
But the U.S. president “must be careful not to allow any suggestion of support for the prime minister with his legal woes to influence Netanyahu to agree to dangerous concessions, such as a Palestinian state that endangers Israel’s existence,” Klein said.
He noted that the criminal case against Omri Sharon, the son of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, “appears to have influenced Ariel Sharon to agree to the disastrous Gaza surrender in 2005,” referring to the disengagement plan that forced Israeli residents out of the coastal enclave.
“Israel cannot afford such mistakes again,” Klein told JNS.
‘A question of etiquette’
Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told JNS that it’s not “good practice” to meddle “in internal Israeli politics.”
“We don’t like it when the Israelis meddle in our politics and vice versa,” he said. “It’s a question of etiquette.”
Netanyahu’s poll numbers in Israel have risen since the recent war with Iran, he pointed out. Trump “is basically saying, ‘I support my friend and ally Benjamin Netanyahu, and the fact that he did the right thing,’” he said.
The U.S. president is also saying that this sort of court case is “taking away from the ability to do his job, and that’s probably the same kind of reaction that he has about the lawsuits that are waged against him,” according to Romirowsky.
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at the Lawfare Project, told JNS that Trump’s comments reflect “a real and growing frustration with what many perceive as the politicization of justice systems, a concern that now echoes far beyond America’s borders.”
“The remedy cannot be to undermine judicial independence for political convenience or the sake of geopolitical alliances,” Filitti said. “If Israel’s legal system is flawed, then it must be reformed from within—through lawful, democratic processes.”
Reform of the legal systems in Israel and the United States is “urgently needed” and “must begin with rigorous scrutiny of prosecutorial conduct, whether cases are brought in pursuit of justice or as tools of political warfare,” he stated.
Gavriel Sanders, spokesman for the Be A Mensch Foundation that seeks to unify Israelis across religious divides, told JNS that “strong U.S.-Israel relations do not imply a vassal state dynamic, in which the larger imposes its will on the smaller.
Netanyahu “has shown masterful leadership throughout 12 harrowing days of war,” he said.
“To see him now dragged into court over what many view as politically motivated pettiness is not only an injustice,” said Sanders. “It is a violation of hakarat hatov, the moral obligation of gratitude.”