The parallelism between the situations of the heads of state of the United States and Israel has been widely noted. The wrong-doing of President Trump is presently being exposed through an impeachment inquiry, while the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just now been indicted for his apparent crimes.
The crimes of which they are accused, and pretty clearly guilty, overlap considerably, such as “bribery,” and what the Israelis call “breach of trust.”
And the two corrupt leaders have both been accusing the justice systems that have ensnared them of conducting “witch hunts,” with no real basis for the accusations, and have been working hard to cripple their nation’s systems of justice just to protect their power and protect themselves from facing the consequences of their corrupt actions.
But the question arises: does all this parallelism have any implications for how things will play out?
And I would like to propose that the Israeli drama might add to the force behind Trump’s impeachment. I don’t want to overstate this potential impact, but just to suggest that it could slightly strengthen the impetus to cleanse the United States of Trump’s presidency.
Here’s what I imagine: The indictment of the Israeli Prime Minister will raise the question, “If the Israelis can hold their corrupt leader accountable, mustn’t the United States show that we, too, will hold our lawless President accountable?”
This question will likely arise — even if subliminally — even based on what’s already happened. It has taken the Israeli justice system almost three years to come to this point, but at last the Israeli Attorney General (a former Netanyahu ally) has come out with the indictments. That in itself declares that “no one is above the law,” and that even the most powerful person in the nation will be held accountable.
So what about here in the United States?
The Israeli example will become more compelling if these indictments end up compelling Netanyahu to resign. The Prime Minister’s giving up his powers is apparently not legally required under Israeli law. But the idea of the nation’s leader being under indictment and heading toward trial is not acceptable in the Israeli political culture, and there have been numerous calls for Netanyahu to step down.
(Quoth one member of the Knesset, from the main opposition party, “Netanyahu and his people are engaged in a last-ditch effort to destroy the justice system in order to save Bibi [Netanyahu]. This cannot be allowed to happen. And we cannot allow someone indicted for bribery to be prime minister.”)
So if the Israelis remove their leader from office, because a long and drawn-out inquiry into his misconduct has found him apparently guilty of crimes, what about here in the United States, where the list of impeachable offenses is long and the betrayal of the nation’s trust still more profound?
We, the nation that put “the rule of law” at the center of our national self-definition, should not be showing ourselves to be less dedicated to affirming that “no one is above the law” than this other small, embattled democracy in the dangerous “neighborhood” of the Middle East.
At least that’s how I imagine that this other story — seven time zones away from Washington, D.C. — will at least subliminally affect the unfolding of the American crisis created by our unprecedentedly lawless President, Donald J. Trump.