The News
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu testified in court for the first time on Tuesday over alleged corruption.
Netanyahu is charged with fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes in three separate cases. He has consistently denied any wrongdoing, describing the allegations as a witch-hunt.
″Eight years I’ve waited for this day. Eight years I have waited to present the truth. Eight years I am waiting to knock down once and for all these deluded and absurd charges against me,” Netanyahu said the evening before his testimony.
The first time a sitting Israeli premier takes the stand as a criminal defendant comes against the backdrop of the ongoing war in Gaza, the entry of Israeli forces into a previously demilitarized buffer zone in Syria-controlled territory, and a tenuous ceasefire in Lebanon.
SIGNALS
Netanyahu trial has divided Israeli public
Netanyahu’s testimony is scheduled for three times a week, six hours a day, over many weeks: That his team has tried to delay the sessions, while his opponents say he should step down as prime minister to stand trial, bears some resemblance to the US, where prosecutions against US President-elect Donald Trump have “divided Americans,” Bloomberg wrote. The case has caused political upheaval, The New York Times noted, prompting some of Netanyahu’s allies to abandon him in an “exodus that has left the country roughly evenly divided between his backers and critics” and forced Netanyahu to form alliances with the far-right.
Netanyahu’s attacks on the judiciary are part of populist playbook
Netanyahu and his supporters have seized on the trial as the latest evidence that Israel’s judiciary is scheming to topple his government, but the “tall tale of a legal deep state putsch against the elected right” simply doesn’t bear out historically, a columnist wrote in Haaretz, since two leaders from the left have so far been brought down by criminal convictions, and none on the right. The judiciary is a particularly ripe target for populists like Netanyahu, the European Center for Populism Studies argued: Judges, loyal to legal procedures and principles rather than specific individuals or political projects, are the very people who are most likely to resist such agendas.