Those inclined to blame Israel for the lack of a truce with Hamas in Gaza have consistently floated a darkly provocative explanation: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to keep the war going to avoid criminal convictions in Israeli courts. But if that explanation is right, shouldn’t advocates of a truce call for the charges against Netanyahu to be dropped?
Now I’m the one being provocative. But the claim that Netanyahu is driven by ulterior motives appears to be strongly influencing liberal opinion about the war in Israel and the United States. It’s worth taking seriously and teasing out.
The background: Israeli prosecutors indicted Netanyahu in three corruption cases in 2019. The complicated allegations involve gifts from a wealthy donor and negotiations with Israeli media owners for favorable coverage. The trials continue while Netanyahu serves as prime minister.
The cases have reverberated in Israeli politics. The country had to hold five elections from 2019 to 2022. One reason for the political instability was that centrist politicians who had previously worked with Netanyahu balked at joining the government of a prime minister under indictment. When Netanyahu finally won a clear parliamentary majority after Israel’s 2022 elections, it was made up entirely of religious and right-wing parties.
Fast-forward to the war prompted by Hamas’s massacre and abduction of Israelis last October. Netanyahu’s Israeli opposition, and American liberals, broadly condemn the prime minister for pursuing “total victory” over Hamas rather than making concessions that might induce it to release Israeli hostages.
Israel’s war aims are the subject of an important debate. It’s distorted by the liberal folk wisdom that this is all really about Netanyahu’s efforts to save his own skin. After the discovery last weekend that Hamas had executed six Israeli hostages, Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that Israel’s prime minister is stubbornly extending the war because he “must stay in power to stay out of prison, if convicted.” An article in Vox similarly announced that Netanyahu “cares very deeply about maintaining his grip on power: it’s the closest thing to a literal get-out-of-jail-free card that a prime minister staring down criminal conviction could have.”
Actually, the prime ministership does not shield Netanyahu from prosecution, conviction or punishment. Israel’s parliament would have to change the law to create immunity for Netanyahu. But assume that the prime minister really is obstructing a hostage deal because he expects the political right’s protection from the criminal process — and knows he would lose that protection if he made concessions in the war that were otherwise in the national interest.
That would make him quite the supervillain. But one way to test the credibility of a theory is to consider its implications. If the caricature of Netanyahu’s motives were accurate, then a deal with Hamas would be significantly more likely in the absence of the criminal cases against him. For the international liberal community pushing a Gaza truce, advocating the end of Netanyahu’s prosecution would be an obvious avenue.
Perhaps that sounds unseemly or corrupt. But Israel is already negotiating the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including many convicted of murder, to get a hostage deal with Hamas. Critics say Israel’s concessions have been insufficient, and want it to compromise on objectives such as control of the Philadelphi Corridor with Egypt, which Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into Gaza. For those who want a cease-fire in Gaza at virtually any cost to Israel: — well, would asking Israel to abandon one politician’s criminal prosecution be too much to ask?
Of course, liberals are hardly likely to make amnesty for Netanyahu a rallying cry. But that’s partly because they must know at some level that the Israeli prime minister’s criminal prosecutions don’t actually explain his behavior.
To the extent that Netanyahu is motivated by self-interest, it’s largely political self-interest. What politician is not? Netanyahu’s Israeli critics on the left and center say a hostage deal under current conditions could break the prime minister’s right-wing coalition, giving them an opportunity to get back in power.
Coalition-pleasing is an ineradicable part of democratic politics. But it isn’t a sufficiently incendiary accusation for those who see Netanyahu as the root of the Middle East’s woes. The resort to theorizing about his legal jeopardy highlights the corrosiveness that can come from mixing the criminal-legal system with democratic politics. The stakes are higher, motives more suspect and debate embittered.
One reason the most nefarious explanation of Netanyahu’s behavior has traction among American liberals is that it plays into the wish that the longest-serving prime minister of Israel is a rogue figure whose ouster would dramatically change the country’s political direction in a way they favor. The evidence for that is weak. Israel is a conservative country whose hawkish sensibilities are widespread.
Netanyahu’s handling of the war hasn’t catered narrowly to the country’s far right. Recent polls have shown Netanyahu competitive with or ahead of his main rivals on the left and center in a reversal from his post-Oct. 7 political nadir. The folk theory of Israel’s prime minister is a distraction — and no matter how vituperative their condemnations, his critics aren’t even acting like they believe it.
