If You Want To See What Can Happen Here, Look At Israel
By
Leonard Zwelling
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/opinion/netanyahu-shin-bet-israel.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/world/middleeast/israel-netanyahu-shin-bet-firing.html
Readers of the blog know that there is no one I trust more when it comes to world politics and especially events in the Middle East than Tom Friedman of The New York Times. He’s been on the ground in the Middle East for decades and knows every important player in the perpetual drama.
In his latest piece on March 17, he outlines the similarity of events in Israel under Bibi Netanyahu and those in Donald Trump’s United States.
Let’s start with Israel.
Mr. Netanyahu wants to fire Ronen Bar, his chief of the Shin Bet, the Israeli FBI equivalent. This would be a first in Israeli history. As you remember, before October 7, 2023, Israel was roiling with demonstrations (which we saw with our own eyes in the summer of 2023) because Mr. Netanyahu wanted to neuter the Israeli Supreme Court, the only real check on his power as the head of state and the head of the legislature, the Knesset. According to Mr. Friedman, there is still one check on Bibi. There is “an independent Attorney General—Gali Baharav-Miara—with both legal power and moral integrity, who declared Sunday that Bibi can’t oust Bar until the factual and legal basis underlying your decision is full examined.”
Sound familiar? It should.
On live TV Tom Homan, Mr. Trump’s border czar said that he would ignore court orders to return arrested illegal immigrants who were rounded up without due process because they were alleged gang members. They may well be. But their citizenship status and criminal activity at least deserves an examination. From what I can tell, they were summarily arrested, loaded on planes, and sent to El Salvador after the U.S. paid $6M.
A close friend and occasional blog reader told me prior to the 2024 election that his greatest concern with Donald Trump’s likely election was the breakdown of the rule of law. He may have been prescient. Mr. Trump and his administration, including Elon Musk, who was neither elected nor vetted by the Senate, are breaking the law with the wholesale firings, the putative illegal immigrant round-ups, and the ignoring of the orders of federal judges.
In Israel, the morning on which I am writing this, Mr. Netanyahu has discarded any chance at peace in Gaza as the early reports have Israel jets killing over 400 people with fresh attacks in Gaza. Will this really get the hostages back? We will see.
Meanwhile, inside Israel and inside the United States the leaders of each country are flouting any hint at a balance of power among the branches within their governments. In the United States, this may well precipitate a constitutional crisis. In Israel, it cannot. The Israelis never got around to writing that constitution promised by David Ben Gurion. There is a crisis in Israel nonetheless.
Mr. Netanyahu has a solution to all crises inside his country. That is to bomb Gaza and never take any responsibility for October 7 just as Mr. Trump has never taken any responsibility for the violence of January 6, 2021.
The parallels are worrisome for the populations of both countries that consider themselves to be in representative governments. Are the leaders of either country really doing what they were elected to do? Time will tell.
