Since Israel began its war on Gaza, there have been calls for the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to stand trial. Thanks to strong support from the United States and some of its allies, it seems unlikely that Netanyahu will have to defend himself against charges of genocide at the Hague any time soon. This has not, however, spared him from having to defend himself before a court of law. Israel’s prime minister spent much of last week in a Tel Aviv courthouse standing trial for graft.
Five years after being indicted, Netanyahu took the witness stand and for hours was forced to answer questions about the severe corruption charges he is accused of committing. This is the first time in Israel’s history that a serving prime minister has stood trial. The proceedings have polarized the Israeli public since 2019. Political parties have, during this period, partly defined themselves based on whether they are for or against Netanyahu. Israel has seen five elections in three and a half years as neither Netanyahu nor his rivals have been able to form stable coalition governments.
Three Cases
The trial involves three separate criminal cases. In the first of these, the so-called Case 1000, Netanyahu is charged with fraud and breach of trust, having allegedly received gifts of expensive cigars, as well as champagne and jewelry for his wife, Sara. The total value of these gifts is around $200,000. The generous benefactors were Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan — an Israeli billionaire who resides in the United States — and Australian media mogul James Packer.
The prosecution maintains that in exchange for these gifts, Netanyahu used his status as prime minister to help Milchan with his business interests. This includes pressuring Israel’s Ministry of Finance into handing out tax exemptions to Milchan, trying to lift government regulation to allow for Milchan to expand his control over Israeli television companies, and using his influence to extend Milchan’s US visa.
Case 2000 also involves charges of fraud and breach of trust. The prosecutors maintain that Arnon Mozes, the owner of Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s biggest-selling daily newspaper, had attempted to bribe Netanyahu. According to the allegations, Netanyahu negotiated with Mozes to receive better coverage in the paper for himself and his family in exchange for promoting legislation that would inhibit the circulation of Yedioth Ahronoth’s biggest rival, a free daily newspaper.
Case 4000, the most severe of the three, charges Netanyahu directly with bribery. The allegations are that the prime minister promised regulatory favors to Shaul Elovitch, the owner of the Bezeq telecommunications company, in exchange for positive media coverage for Netanyahu and his wife on the news website Walla, owned by Elovitch. The attorney general has estimated that these illicit dealings benefited Elovitch to the tune of five hundred million dollars.
As a result of Netanyahu’s corruption trial, major protests erupted in 2020, continuing into 2021, referred to by the media as the “Balfour Protests” after Balfour Street in Jerusalem, the location of the prime minister’s residency. These protests helped mobilize center-left voters. This, along with his disastrous mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis, led Prime Minister Netanyahu to lose the March 2021 election.
An Unpopular Front
The coalition that emerged in March 2021 was a shaky one. Nicknamed the “Government of Change,” it was comprised of parties of the Right, the Center, and the Left, and even included the United Arab List, which is the electoral wing of the Arab and Islamic Movement. The glue that held together these parties, which disagreed over diverse questions — from whether to raise the minimum wage to whether to engage in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — was their opposition to Netanyahu.
The right-wing parties within the anti-Netanyahu bloc forced through harsh, unpopular economic austerity: raising the retirement age for women, suspending furlough payments for unemployed workers, raising the price of public transportation, and cutting childcare subsidies. Netanyahu — always the right-populist — employed social demagogy mixed with racist incitement, claiming the government pushed these austerity measures in order to allocate tens of billions of shekels to the United Arab List. This pressure influenced several right-wing members of the ruling coalition, who — owing also to their careerism and opportunism — decided to defect to Netanyahu’s party, lured by promises of future ministerial posts in his next government.
After this highly unstable coalition collapsed, and Netanyahu returned to power in the November 2022 elections, waging an election campaign focused on promises of increased social spending, he now presides over the most nationalist and extremist government in Israel’s history. One of the first policies announced by his new far-right government following the elections was a plan to reform the judicial system in such a way that would give the government decisive power over the judicial branch.
For many, this represents an attempt by Netanyahu to tilt the board in his favor, trying to delay or derail his corruption trial. Others pointed to the detrimental effects of this reform — “the Judicial Overhaul” or “the Judicial Coup” as critics have termed it — on democratic rights and civil liberties within Israel.
The response was a major wave of protests — drawing hundreds of thousands to the streets, week after week, for almost ten months — alarmed at the antidemocratic nature of the proposed reforms. For the most part, these protests were led by liberal-centrist political forces, whose criticism of Netanyahu was limited to his corruption charges and to his infringement on the independence of the judicial system. Most of the opposition forces, especially those of the center and the moderate right, saw this mass protest as a denunciation of Netanyahu, but not of Netanyahu’s policies. The continuation of the occupation and his neoliberal austerity were left unchallenged.
Yet within the so-called Democracy Protests, there was also a left wing. These groups and movements stressed that combatting the far right effectively required addressing the totality of their political project, not only their intention to dismantle the judicial system. Various groups intervened in these mass protests, each according to its own political line and communication strategy. However, despite mobilizing the activist left, these voices remained in the margins of a mass protest movement that generally saw broader social critique as an obstacle to winning greater public support, and sometimes also as a distraction from its core focus of equating “democracy” with “independence of the judiciary.”
Following October 7, and the war that ensued, the judicial overhaul took backstage. The mass demonstrations, which used to draw huge crowds on a regular basis, stopped almost overnight. Nobody talked about Netanyahu’s trial or the judiciary, neither the liberal opposition nor the far-right government, whose ministers now turned to spend their days making genocidal statements against the Palestinians. It would take months before Israelis came out to the streets en masse again.
When they did, it was to pressure the government to agree to a hostage deal, one that would bring back alive the Israeli hostages held captive by Hamas inside the Gaza Strip. These protests, which represent a sort of continuation of the two previous protest waves, have for many months also called for Netanyahu’s resignation and for early elections to be held.
Currently, the demand to end the war on Gaza through a hostage deal enjoys strong support among 72 percent of Israelis. Among voters who support the Netanyahu-aligned parties, 56 percent back a deal to stop the war in return for the hostages.
This reflects the fact that the protest movement by the families of the hostages was incredibly successful in building opposition to the war among Israeli public sentiment, being far more effective at that than the official opposition parties, which trailed public opinion and started to publicly question the war only after the polls showed a conclusive majority wanted it to end.
All the while, the peace movement in Israel has continued to mobilize against the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, despite police repression, calling to stop the killing of innocent Palestinians, lift the siege on Gaza, and allow humanitarian aid to deal with the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.
Netanyahu is now on a collision course with public opinion in Israel. His insistence on continuing the war in Gaza is both an expression of his deeply held belief in maintaining a state of permanent conflict, and also of the fact that his coalition partners — the Religious Zionism Party and the openly fascist Jewish Power Party — have threatened to withdraw their support from his government, forcing early elections, if he agrees to a deal that would end the war.
For Netanyahu, early elections spell doom, since polls consistently show that the parties that currently form his coalition government are expected to lose their majority in the Knesset, winning together only fifty-one out of the 120 Knesset seats. The new government that could be formed as a result of such elections will possibly be a repeat of the “Government of Change,” although it remains unclear who will be the dominant forces within it and who will assume the role of prime minister.
In the meanwhile, Netanyahu’s lawyers are stalling for time in his corruption trial, trying to postpone court sessions, citing his responsibilities as prime minister. But if removed from office, his trial is expected to continue with vigor. Thus, the prospect of seeing Netanyahu behind bars remains likely. If not in the Hague, then perhaps in Tel Aviv.
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Uri Weltmann is the national field organizer of Standing Together, Israel’s biggest grassroots movement of Jewish and Palestinian citizens that campaigns for peace, equality, and social and climate justice.
