Once, back when he was still seen as something close to a bipartisan consensus figure in the United States and not as someone younger voters on both sides will not even hear mentioned, the prime minister was nicknamed “the senator from Merhavia.” He brought to Israel the foundations of American politics, the rhetoric, the look and of course “what English he has,” and he exported the Israeli story to America in a language Americans understood, sharp, brief, punchy. Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, treated him cautiously and absorbed a full dose of humiliations. The Republican president spent his first term gratifying his every wish, and is learning the lesson, slowly enough, in his second term.
But through all those years, Benjamin Netanyahu never looked like someone who did not grasp the enormous importance of Israeli sovereignty, especially when facing the superpower that in practice sustains Israel’s existence through money, diplomacy and more. On the contrary, nothing in the international arena made him prouder than the ability to stand up to American presidents, not Trump of course, and tell them, “Over my dead body.” Many Israelis thought he was wrong, but that was his mandate as a legally elected leader, to represent only the Israeli interest, whose oxygen comes from the miracle called “Israeli sovereignty.” Without it, there is nothing.
That sovereignty, it seems, Netanyahu has decided to run over with a bulldozer. The video he released in English, where he once again whines about the trial against him, was meant to signal to Father Trump to come save his child from the “bullies” who cannot even manage to hold three hearings a week. “Political officials” said the English video was designed to prepare public opinion in the United States and pressure Trump to step up his moves, so that the American public would be convinced he is being persecuted.
Never mind that it exposes the truth behind the nonsense of “the cases are collapsing.” This is not what someone confident of a full acquittal sounds like. It is what someone a step away from seeking political asylum at the Mar-a-Lago estate sounds like. A prime minister who has just submitted a request for a pardon, without using the word “pardon” himself, and then races to smear the justice system to get artillery support from a friendly but still foreign actor, is admitting on his own what Israel has become, a shabby kolkhoz in America’s puppet theater.
Once, back when he was still seen in the United States as an almost bipartisan consensus figure and not as someone younger voters on both sides refuse even to hear named, the prime minister was nicknamed “the senator from Merhavia.”
The good news is that at least the days of hypocritical wailing against this or that organization for “defaming Israel,” for example on the issue of the treatment of Palestinians inside Israel’s borders and beyond them, are over. No speech by the CEO of B’Tselem against the IDF, for example, creates the damage done by the country’s leader acting in a frenzy to get another state to send a rescue mission in the form of unprecedented intervention in Israel’s internal affairs. If Ehud Olmert, for instance, had so much as muttered something in the direction of President George W. Bush, and they were no less friendly than Trump and Netanyahu, and begged him to deal with the state prosecutor at the time, Moshe Lador, the entire right wing would have gone berserk at the scale of the humiliation.
But just as Netanyahu appoints the heads of the country’s most sensitive organizations, he conducts the battle for his own freedom with no rules and no restraints. Anyone who does not see the connection between Netanyahu’s dependence on the Americans in his criminal cases and the inability to trust an appointment like Roman Gofman to lead the Mossad is granting himself a discount called the “old world,” a world in which Netanyahu was still “the senator from Merhavia” and not someone willing to abandon Israeli sovereignty to save his own skin.
First published: 22:18, 12.05.25