If it were not obvious that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by Israel believes he has an ally in his battle against the country’s attorney general, his judges and even the head of his home security service, clarified on Wednesday evening.
“In America and Israel, when a strong right -wing leader wins the elections, the Deep State on the left wears the judicial system to counter the will of the people,” he wrote in a post on social media. “They don’t win in either of the two places! We are strong together.”
The Defiant, Trumpian Blast was the last proof of the fact that Mr. Netanyahu and President Trump are managing the same playbook book to achieve surprisingly similar goals: to neutral the judiciary, dismantle a supervision system that puts a check on their authority and discredit the professionals of national security that they see as lined up against them.
These moves come when Trump aligned his policy in the Middle East exactly for the benefit of Mr. Netanyahu, including giving the Israeli Prime Minister the freedom to renew the war in Gaza and launch US air attacks against Houthi in Yemen, a group that is an supposing enemy of Israel.
Just this week in Washington, Trump asked for the impeachment of a federal judge who was looking for basic information on his mass deportation efforts, fired two democratic commissioners of an independent commercial commission and was reproached by a judge who said that his administration is more likely that foreign aid probably violated the Constitution.
This week in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet fired Ronen Bar, head of Shin Bet, Israeli equivalent of the FBI, after the agency began investigations on the Prime Minister’s helpers. Among other statements, the assistants are accused of mistreating classified information and of having traveled a document to a foreign newspaper. Mr. Netanyahu’s office strongly denied the accusations.
The move of Mr. Netanyahu against the Shin Bet came weeks after his administration has announced his intention to lay off the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Ciara, an apolitical judicial official appointed by the previous government that frustrated Mr. Netanyahu by blocking some of his decisions for legal reasons.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu is trying to curb household guard dogs and judicial authorities who, as in the United States, have pursued investigations against him or his allies.
Like Mr. Trump, the Israeli Prime Minister has undergone criminal accusations that according to him are false statements fomented with leftist and unleashed bureaucrats. In the case of Mr. Netanyahu, he was tried in a case of corruption of years that requires him to appear in court several times a month.
“Trump’s Illiberism gave Netanyahu an unprecedented opportunity to impose his own in Israel,” said Aaron David Miller, an expert in the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Trump’s popularity in Israel and Vulcania mind merges between Trump and Netanyahu to undermine the independence of the courts and fight the” Woke Left “protects and excites Netanyahu.”
Miller said that Netanyahu has long since taken ideas from other authoritarian leaders, such as Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. And the battle of Mr. Netanyahu against what he calls the “deep state” precedes the presidency of Mr. Trump.
He was questioned for the first time by the police about the accusations of corruption in early 2017, weeks before Mr. Trump came into office for his first term. When the trial of Mr. Netanyahu began in 2020, he stopped on the steps of the court of Jerusalem, accusing the accusation, the police and the establishment of the media of a joint attempt “to counter the will of the people”. He is accused of granting regulatory favors to businessmen and media magnates in exchange for gifts and favorable news of the news, which denies.
The formal attempts of the Prime Minister to undermine the judicial power began in 2022, when his coalition government introduced the legislation intended to limit the power of the Supreme Court and give the government greater control over the appointment of its judges. After mass protests, the government has suspended most of these moves for more than a year.
But Mr. Netanyahu appears galvanized after the election of Mr. Trump in November. Since then, his government has revived the revision of the process of judicial appointments and is pushing the bill through Parliament.
An Israeli official informed on the thought of Mr. Netanyahu said that Mr. Trump’s elections had given the prime minister major confidence in taking provocative steps at home and in the war in Gaza, who intensified this week after the collapse of an agreement of ceased the fire that had been mediated at the beginning of this year. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
For his part, Trump has found a common cause with other illiberal leaders such as Mr. Orban, Prime Minister Narendra modes of India and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Trump said this month that Putin “crossed a lot with me”, referring to the investigations of the FBI on Russian interference in the 2016 elections and to the contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian agents.
It was in the middle of that investigation when Trump fired James B. Comey, the director of the FBI who had refused to free him publicly of any link with Russia. Mr. Comey had also refused to yield to the pressure of Mr. Trump to abandon an FBI investigation on Michael T. Flynn, a former national security councilor of the White House.
Eight years later, Netanyahu convinced his cabinet to shoot Mr. Bar, despite the great road protests in Jerusalem this week who denounced his threats to remove the boss Shin Bet. On Friday, the Supreme Court of Israel issued an injunction by freezing the dismissal of the Signor Bar until the judges could hear the petitions that had been presented against it.
Alon Pinkas, a political commentator and the former General Consul of Israel in New York, said that it was doubt that Mr. Netanyahu would move against the head Shin Bet if Mr. Trump had not been president. The two leaders were politically for the related spirits, he said, and they had both adopted an identical language that would have made George Orwell shiver with envy “.
Trump and Mr. Netanyahu also regularly use this language to discredit the media, another institution that often see with contempt. The National Israeli broadcaster, Kan, reported this week that it was during a meeting with Mr. Trump in Washington last month when Mr. Netanyahu was inspired to fire the Signor Bar.
To the question to comment on that relationship, the spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, Omer Dostri, replied with a concise text message: “False news”.