Story of two Jewish leaders

Volodymyr Zelensky He made headlines again on Sunday by sacking a deputy infrastructure minister suspected of corruption.

“I want to make it clear: there will be no turning back,” the Ukrainian president said, referring to his country’s well-deserved reputation for corruption.

The minister is suspected of being part of a group that accepted bribes in exchange for contracts for the purchase of equipment and machinery.

The next day, Zelensky barred government officials from traveling abroad for non-government purposes, presumably to prevent them from hiding any ill-gotten gains overseas, but also to reassure international donors that they have an honest and reliable partner.

Also on Sunday, another world leader fired another corrupt official, but that’s a different story altogether.

The Israeli Supreme Court ordered Benjamin Netanyahu remove Aryeh Deri, convicted of tax fraud, from his post in Netanyahu’s cabinet as health and interior minister.

The prime minister complied with the order “with a heavy heart, great regret and a very difficult feeling,” as he expressed in a letter to Deri that he read aloud at a cabinet meeting.

Netanyahu will continue to push to include Deri in government.

I could charge you Deputy Prime Minister.

What a contrast.

In the midst of a desperate war for national survival, Zelensky is leading a campaign to oust the thieves from the government. And desperate to stay in office,

Netanyahu is carrying out a campaign to keep thieves.

For years I have had an ambivalent view of Netanyahu.

He’s not a good boy.

His father said of him that he “doesn’t know how to develop ways that win people over for praise or grace.”

Many of his political opponents were once his ideological soulmates, but have been repulsed by his unscrupulousness.

“According to my code, this is a sin for which there is no forgiveness, even on Yom Kippur,” Avigdor Lieberman, a former defense minister, said of his former boss after denouncing that Netanyahu had authorized private investigations About your family.

The good thing about Netanyahu is that he was good at his job.

Israel prospered economically under his rule.

He has established thriving ties with former adversaries in Africa and the Arab world.

He achieved incredible intelligence boosts and greatly reduced the power of iran in syria without unleashing all-out war.

And despite Netanyahu’s reputation as a right-wing flamethrower, he generally ruled more near the center that of the periphery.

For these reasons, I once called Netanyahu the Richard Nixon From Israel.

But it turned out to be very rude to Nixon.

At least there were limits to what the 37th president was willing to do to the constitutional system of government to stay in office.

Nothing of the sort can be said of Netanyahu, who is now using his four-seat parliamentary majority (won by less than 50% of the total vote) to push through a radical overhaul of the judiciary that would allow Knesset overturn Supreme Court verdicts with a single-vote parliamentary majority.

American conservatives who are reflexively inclined to support Netanyahu might ask how they would like a system in which Chuck Schumer could use a majority of a Senate seat to overturn the judgments of the Supreme Courtlike the Dobbs decision on abortion.

The issue is even more important for Israel, which lacks a formal written constitution and the usual separations of power that help guarantee minority rights against majority rule.

As one Israeli leader put it in 2012:

“The difference between countries where rights are only on paper and those where real rights exist: that difference is a strong and independent court,” he added:

“In places without a strong and independent judiciary, rights cannot be protected.”

The name of that Israeli leader: Netanyahu.

What has changed?

Netanyahu has gotten himself into a legal mess, which has given him every interest in bringing the judiciary to its knees.

His coalition partners are desperate for a permanent exemption from military service for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, which the judiciary has rightly opposed on the grounds of equality.

But Netanyahu has also moved along the stream of illiberal democracy to which other champions belongthe Hungarian Viktor Orban and to the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro.

​ Populist, hyperpersonalized governance achieved by gutting institutional checks and balances is how democracies become mafiocracies.

That’s why America’s Founding Fathers built our system the way they did.

After the last Israeli election, I wrote that it was wrong to say that Israel was facing imminent fascism.

I still think this is correct:

Israeli civil society remains highly motivated, its military leaders remain loyal to democratic norms, and even Netanyahu had to bow in court by firing Deri.

Other democracies have survived far worse leaders, including, very recently, ours.

But if Israel is to persevere, it must also maintain the moral respect of its honest friends.

Too bad today the greatest leader of the Jewish people resides in Kiev, Ukraine, and not in Jerusalem.

c.2023 The New York Times Society