Netanyahu (and Trump) Reaching Out for a Pardon

A new, indeed grotesque, twist has been added to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s years’ long campaign to undermine Israel’s judiciary against the backdrop of his trial on corruption charges, which began in January 2020. Last Sunday he asked the country’s president, Yitzhak Herzog, to pardon him even though he did not include the word “pardon” in his letter to the president. The letter and the accompanying 111-page brief by his lawyers argued that the pardon would enable Netanyahu “to reduce the divisions in Israeli society” – a divisiveness that he himself has fomented these past three years between liberals-left-wingers and the ruling Right, between secular and religious Jews, and between Israel’s Jews and Arabs.

Netanyahu is on trial on three specific counts, involving bribery, fraud and breach of trust. In “Case 1000,” Netanyahu is accused of soliciting and receiving over 2011-2016, from Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan and Australian millionaire James Packer, over 2011-2016, crates of expensive pink champagne, Cuban cigars and, for his wife Sarah, jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for a variety of favors. In cases “2000” and “4000” Netanyahu is charged with trying to engineer positive media coverage of himself and his government in exchange for favors worth many millions of dollars for the media company owners.

The trial has been drawn-out due principally to the stalling tactics of Netanyahu’s lawyers and the Corona epidemic and to the calls on Netanyahu’s time by his functioning as prime minister, which over the past two years has included Israel’s multi-front war against its Islamist enemies (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi militias and Iran). In a supremely foolish, short-sighted and, indeed, pusillanimous decision, Israel’s Supreme Court back in May 2020 ruled (by a vote of 11-0!) that Netanyahu could serve, in effect, as prime minister – even while on trial for corruption.

Since the start of the trial, Netanyahu and his ministers have been busy subverting Israel’s judicial system, specifically targeting Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, the State Attorney’s (prosecutorial) Office, and the country’s Supreme Court and its current, liberal president, Yitzhak Amit. Netanyahu, head of the right-wing Likud Party, has argued that the judiciary is dominated by liberals and left-wingers who are engaged in a political and personal “witch-hunt” against him – even though he was indicted by Baharav-Miara’s predecessor, Avichai Mendelblit, a Netanyahu appointee and religious right-winger.

The main aim of Netanyahu’s campaign, involving threats and blackening the names of the judicial mandarins, has been to call off the trial (a prerogative of the attorney-general) and, more generally, to subordinate the judiciary to the will of the executive branch of government (meaning Netanyahu). But with Baharav-Miara resisting Netanyahu’s efforts to oust her from office and with the trial, focusing on Case 1000, apparently going against him (and with a jail-term almost assured if he is convicted), Netanyahu has opted for the indirect approach: To obtain a pardon from President Herzog which will necessarily result in aborting the trial.

The change of strategy was augured by President Trump’s very public call, during his address to the Knesset (parliament) on 13 October 2025, with Herzog standing beside him, for a presidential pardon for Netanyahu. It quickly emerged that Netanyahu had asked Trump to make the pitch, which was then followed by letters to Herzog from Trump and from Netanyahu’s obsequious Cabinet ministers calling for the pardon. Last Monday, in Netanyahu’s telephone conversation with Trump, the two discussed developments in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon – and Netanyahu again raised the pardon issue and asked the American president to do more (such as pressuring Herzog) to help him.

It has been suggested that Trump’s intervention is not merely the result of fellow-feeling by one judicially assailed leader to another but the product of a serious political-diplomatic calculus. Once relieved of the threat of the trial, Netanyahu could engineer a radical governmental reshuffle in which he would oust his religious and extreme right-wing coalition partners (who oppose any concessions to the Palestinians) and replace them with centrist-liberal ministers, which would allow him to seal a deal with Saudi Arabia, which has demanded as the price of normalizing relations with Israel Netanyahu’s agreement to countenance the emergence of a Palestinian state within a two-state compromise settlement.

Last week Netanyahu handed the Israeli president his formal appeal for a pardon. The problem with this – which is the dilemma now confronting Herzog – is that, according to Israeli law, presidential pardons can only be dispensed to convicted criminals (avaryanim, in Hebrew), and they have never been granted to anyone while still on trial. Moreover, pardons have always been granted to criminals who have admitted, and regretted, their crimes. Netanyahu, of course, has never admitted to any wrong-doing (just as he has consistently refrained from admitting any responsibility for the October 7, 2023 debacle when Hamas forces invaded southern Israel, triggering the current war).

Curiously, the only exception to this avaryanim rule occurred during the presidency of Herzog’s father, Chaim Herzog, Israel’s 6^th president (1983-1993). In August 1986 Chaim Herzog pardoned eleven members of the General Security Service, the Shin Bet (Israel’s FBI), after they had murdered two years earlier two captured Palestinians who had hijacked a bus in central Israel, and subsequently mounted a mendacious, systematic cover-up. The pardons were issued before any indictments were issued or a trial. The pardoned GSS officers included the head of the organization, Avraham Shalom, who had given the order to execute the two Palestinians. As part of the pardon deal, Shalom was forced to resign. Several of the other pardoned officers continued to serve in the GSS – while three GSS whistle-blowers, who denounced Shalom to then prime minister Shimon Peres, were dismissed from the service. The pardons, challenged on legal grounds, were upheld by the Supreme Court.

If anything, Netanyahu’s letter to Herzog confessed to nothing – and, in effect, charged the judiciary, particularly Baharav-Miara and the State Attorney’s lawyers, with wrong-doing by hounding him. Netanyahu’s explained that, if pardoned, he would be able to deal with “issues relating to the judicial system and the media, issues he was unable to attend to because of his trial.” The irony here was not lost on Netanyahu’s critics - as Netanyahu is largely responsible for the problems relating to the functioning of the judiciary and for the government’s ongoing assault on the independence of the country’s news media, which for the most part have been critical of his performance as prime minister. In a masterstroke of hypocrisy, Netanyahu averred in his letter that he believed “that his personal interest was to proceed with the trial to its end sustained by the confidence that he would be found completely innocent.“ But he was willing to put his personal interests aside, he wrote, given “the need to unite the people and end the divisions.” Netanyahu even cited the case of Richard Nixon, who was pardoned by his successor, US President Gerald Ford, “even though he never admitted to any wrong-doing.” In his letter, Netanyahu cited his long years of service to the state and, somewhat irrelevantly, the fact that his brother, Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, had died serving Israel (in the famed raid in 1976 in Entebbe, Uganda, when Israeli commandos under his command freed more than 100 hostages from the hands of Palestinian and German terrorists who had hijacked an Air France airliner).

All of Israel’s political Opposition leaders criticized Nertanyahu’s move as illegal (the trial was ongoing, there was no admission of guilt). One of them – Benny Gantz, head of the centrist National Unity Party – argued that Netanyahu’s appeal for pardon was a ploy geared to deflecting public attention away from the highly unpopular bill Netanyahu is currently trying to push through the Knesset exempting ultra-orthodox Jews from military service, a bill that will ensure longevity for his coalition government (which includes two ultra-orthodox parties).

Herzog, responding pithily to the Netanyahu request, said that he would give the matter “serious consideration.” Herzog’s critics, which include most of Israel’s legal experts, say that the president should have immediately swatted down the pardon request. Israeli media now reports that Herzog is desperately seeking the backing of one or more prominent jurists who would endorse a “creative” route to a pardon. Some observers suggested that such “creativity” would see Herzog making the pardon contingent on an iron-clad guarantee that Netanyahu would resign from the premiership and promise to stay out of politics for 5-7 years. But most observers don’t believe Netanyahu will agree to such conditions - or admit to any wrong-doing.

Herzog is reported to have pressed for a pardon for Netanyahu even before he was elected president by the Knesset in July 2021. Herzog was previously the leader of Israel’s center-left Labor Party, when he ran against Netanyahu for the premiership. Yet Netanyahu backed Herzog’s run for the presidency while the Likud, to everyone’s surprise, did not put forward a candidate of its own. It was rumored at the time that Netanyahu and Herzog had secretly reached a deal involving a promise by Herzog to pardon Netanyahu should he be convicted in the trial that began a few months before. Since becoming president, Herzog has repeatedly proposed that the trial be halted, perhaps through a plea bargain. In 2017, Herzog visited Hadas Klein, Milchan’s aide who was then being questioned by the police and later emerged as a main witness in the Case 1000 trial (she testified that the Netanyahus had demanded and steadily received champagne, cigars and jewelry from Milchan and Packer. Netanyahu said that they were gifts from “friends”). During that visit it appears that Herzog subtly tried to persuade Klein not to testify against Netanyahu. Since then, Klein has continuously been harassed and threatened by Netanyahu supporters, including by a close aide of Sarah Netanyahu’s. During the past three years, Herzog – in what many Israelis regard as cowardly behavior - has declined to criticize Netanyahu’s efforts to subvert Israel’s judiciary.

Most observers believe that if Herzog does eventually issue the pardon, it will be challenged by Baharav-Miara as illegal and may well be batted down by the Supreme Court. But many hope that the trial, which triggered Netanyahu’s efforts to destroy the country’s judiciary, will somehow be brought to an end.