Opinion | Democracy Is on the Line in Israel and America

Are we seeing the slow-motion collapse of the rule of law in the United States and Israel at the same time? It is too early to answer that question, but it is no longer too early to ask it.

As readers of my column know, I pay close attention to political trends in Israel because a lot of things happen there in miniature. It’s my Off Broadway to Broadway. Well, what is playing Off Broadway today is chilling. Is it also our future?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — Israel’s carbon copy of President Donald Trump — announced Sunday his intention to fire the widely respected chief of Israel’s equivalent of the F.B.I., the Shin Bet director, Ronen Bar. It is Netanyahu’s latest move in an effort he began soon after taking power in early 2023 “to neuter the judiciary and to concentrate control of all branches of government in his own hands,” as David Horovitz put it in a Times of Israel editorial.

No head of the Shin Bet has ever been sacked by a prime minister in Israel’s 77-year history — and certainly not in the middle of an ongoing war, in which Bar was one of Israel’s most senior hostage negotiators.

So why now? Netanyahu said that he lost “trust” in Bar, who helped command Israel’s hostage rescues in Gaza and hundreds of other operations. Nonsense.

“A few weeks ago,” wrote Yossi Melman, an intelligence expert at Haaretz, with the help of the Shin Bet, “the Israel Police decided to launch an investigation into two of Netanyahu’s spokespeople and a former strategic adviser over serious suspicions of dubious ties and financial transactions with Qatar, a country that supports terrorist organizations including Hamas — including deals made during the war. ‘Qatar-gate,’ as the scandal has been dubbed, has the potential to lead to charges of behavior bordering on treason.”

Unlike in today’s America, though, Israel has an independent attorney general — Gali Baharav-Miara — with both legal power and moral integrity, who declared late Sunday that Bibi can’t oust Bar “until the factual and legal basis underlying your decision is fully examined, as well as your authority to address the matter at this time.” That’s because Bibi himself is on trial for corruption and should absent himself from making any appointments in law enforcement agencies that might be involved in his own trials.

This is setting up a constitutional crisis unlike anything Israel has ever seen. Sound familiar? As The Times reported, the Trump administration is heading to a “constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government” as a result of “airplane loads of Venezuelan detainees deplaned in El Salvador even though a federal judge had ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States.”

Time to stop kidding ourselves, folks. The rule of law is in danger in both America and Israel if some red lines are not drawn and defended right now.