Tens of thousands of Israelis rallied on June 5 outside of Israel’s Supreme Court demanding that Israel’s radical, activist justices, and Israel’s rogue attorney general cease and desist from their efforts to overthrow the Netanyahu government. While that sounds overheated, the truth is that the demands are justified, and even tame, by American standards.
I just returned from an educational mission to Israel as part of a delegation of senior American attorneys and judges. We went to Israel to study its legal system. During our week in the country, we met with Israel’s Supreme Court justices, representatives of the attorney general, and other leading Israeli jurists. As an American, I was alarmed by what we discovered, and the lessons it bears for Americans.
A few days before we arrived, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the Netanyahu government has no right to fire the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service, the Shin Bet. The law on the books explicitly grants that power to the government. But that made no difference to the justices. Justices in Israel reject all limits on their power, including the requirement of basing their judgments on law.
On its face, the judgment made no sense. Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar oversaw the greatest intelligence failure in Israeli history – the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion. And then he refused to resign. If anything, his firing came a year and a half late. The reason that the justices decided to let the law – and minimal professional qualifications – be damned was political. They approve of Bar’s far-left politics and his opposition to the government.
The most remarkable aspect of the ruling was that on its face, it was unnecessary. By the time the justices issued their ruling, Bar had already resigned and the government rescinded its decision to fire him. The justices didn’t issue the ruling to protect Bar. They did it to empower Israel’s attorney general to prevent the government from appointing his successor.
Like Bar, Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara was appointed by the previous government. And like Bar, she refused to resign when the government was voted out of office. The Netanyahu government, for its part, tried to make the best of the situation, knowing that the Supreme Court would overturn any decision it made to fire her.
With job security in hand, Miara devotes her efforts to making it impossible for the government to govern.
On Oct. 7, for instance, Miara insisted that Prime Minister Netanyahu had no legal right to declare war without approval from the security cabinet. As a consequence, while Hamas invaded Israel at 6:30 a.m., Netanyahu was unable to order the IDF to change its open fire rules until late in the afternoon. Who knows how many people were killed because of her rush to undermine the power of the prime minister.
Acting on the justices’ signal, Miara rushed out an order barring the government from hiring a replacement without the approval of a committee chaired by a retired Supreme Court justice, who for his part, refuses to convene his committee. Here too, the attorney general acted without legal basis.
It bears noting that the president of Israel’s Supreme Court, Yitzhak Amit, has no legal right to his position. The judicial appointments committee charged with selecting the justices is chaired by Israel’s justice minister, who refused to convene the committee to appoint Amit. Rather than accept that he would not serve in the position, Amit unlawfully convened the committee himself and voted himself into office.
The idea guiding Israel’s legal fraternity’s extralegal actions is the Platonic concept of the Guardians Council. Israel’s justices and government lawyers have proudly declared themselves the “gatekeepers” to Israel’s governing system. It is their job, as they see it, to protect “the state” from the wrong sort of leaders, in the name of “democracy.” For those paying attention – they may have heard a similar chorus being sung in the United States seeking to keep President Trump out of power for the past decade.
When the left wins elections, the legal fraternity rubber stamps its policies. When the right wins the elections, its leaders find themselves under criminal probes, while the government’s policies are stymied and blocked through regulatory or legal blocks with little to no legal basis.
When the Netanyahu government launched an effort to place limits on the court’s power in early 2023, the legal system declared a political war. A group of leftist Israeli billionaires funded the most expensive political campaign in Israeli history to destroy governance in Israel and discredit the government internationally. Their campaign accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his associates of seeking to destroy Israeli democracy. Recently, we learned that under the Biden administration, the U.S. government was also funding this effort to the tune of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars through USAID. Two congressional committees are now investigating that effort.
That campaign to undermine Israel’s elected leadership did not let up even after Israel was drawn into a historic and existential war against Iran. Following the Oct. 7 invasion, Israel was forced to fight on multiple fronts – not only against Hamas and Hezbollah, but now directly against the Islamic Republic of Iran itself.
In recent weeks, Israel has struck deep into Iranian territory, targeting key nuclear sites in Natanz and Arak, and taking out major military and nuclear figures responsible for decades of terror. Operation Rising Lion was not just a military success. It was a survival necessity. When the U.S. joined in with Operation Midnight Hammer, with stealth bombers and bunker-buster bombs destroying Iran’s Fordow facility, it marked a decisive moment in the global fight against nuclear proliferation. And through it all, Netanyahu led. He led while under legal siege, in and out of courtrooms, while coordinating a joint U.S.-Israel strike that might have prevented a nuclear holocaust.
President Donald Trump called out the insanity in a Truth Social post, declaring: “It is terrible what they are doing in Israel to Bibi Netanyahu. He is a War Hero, and a Prime Minister who did a fabulous job working with the United States to bring Great Success in getting rid of the dangerous Nuclear threat in Iran... It is a POLITICAL WITCH HUNT... This travesty of ‘Justice’ will interfere with both Iran and Hamas negotiations... LET BIBI GO, HE’S GOT A BIG JOB TO DO!”
Hours later, an Israeli court postponed Netanyahu’s testimony for two weeks, citing diplomatic and national security concerns. The message was clear: The international pressure, including from the United States, was working.
This trial is not about justice. It’s about politics. Netanyahu stands accused of accepting cigars and media coverage. These are charges that are laughable in any other context, let alone during a time of war.
Trump is right. The Israeli legal fraternity is hounding a prime minister in the middle of a war that is testing the very survival of the Jewish state.
When we Americans think of Prime Minister Netanyahu, we do so in the context of the seven-front war Israel has been fighting since Oct. 7, 2023, against Iran and its terrorist armies. Now that war includes the largest direct military exchange between Israel and Iran in modern history, co-led by the United States, which dropped the most powerful non-nuclear bombs in the world on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. We rarely notice that as Netanyahu leads Israel at this most difficult time, he is forced to spend two days a week in a courtroom defending himself against trumped-up charges that disintegrated on the witness stand years ago, but that the legal fraternity refuses to dismiss.
Netanyahu is leading his nation in war while his legal system is subverting his power to appoint senior security leaders and doing its best to destabilize, with the goal of overthrowing his government.
That Netanyahu withstood this onslaught, both legal and military, and still led his tiny country to obliterate Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon is a testament to his historic leadership. As President Trump said, “This travesty of justice can not be allowed.”
It is time for every remaining charge against Prime Minister Netanyahu to be dropped. Not delayed. Not rescheduled. Dropped. Permanently. Israel must let its war leader lead.
The lawfare that Israel’s legal fraternity wages against the Netanyahu government must serve as a warning for Americans. The lawfare against Netanyahu and his supporters bears clear similarities to the lawfare that America’s deep state has waged against President Donald Trump and his supporters. Today, with federal judges issuing nationwide injunctions to undermine President Trump’s constitutional duty to cut waste, secure our border, and expel our enemies, we need only look to Israel to see where we are headed if we fail to check the powers of the judiciary.
Now, in the middle of the most dangerous war Israel has fought since its founding, the legal fraternity continues its crusade, dragging the nation’s wartime prime minister into court over trivial charges while he fights to defend the state from annihilation.
Our common enemies – Marxists and their jihadi foot soldiers – are trying to destroy western civilization. And their leftist attorneys and judges are aiding and abetting that destruction. This is the battle of good vs. evil, light vs. darkness.
Drop the charges. Let Netanyahu lead. And win.
Mike Davis is the founder and president of the Article III Project.
