A Single Phone Call Just Blew Open Netanyahu’s Pardon Panic

Right, so for the first time in twenty years you can actually see Benjamin Netanyahu flinch, because no man who thinks he’s winning asks the president to pardon him before the case is over, and no man who believes in his own innocence rings Donald Trump begging for a second round of help to secure said pardon, yet here he is doing both, and pretending it’s about “national unity” while four hundred retired police officers have joined forces, warning Isaac Herzog that granting this political favour could rip the country open. It’s the sort of move you make when you’ve run out of moves, when the trial you’ve spent half a decade attacking is finally closing in, and when even your own legal team can’t promise the next witness won’t sink you. Netanyahu built a career on looking untouchable; now he’s acting like a man looks like he sees exactly where the next blow is coming from and knows he can’t block it.
Right, so for the first time in two decades, Benjamin Netanyahu is behaving like a man who seems to believe the machinery he has leaned on, bullied, stalled, and bent to his needs is finally slipping out of his control, and the tone of the entire political moment shifts when you realise he knows it, because nothing else explains why a sitting prime minister who has spent years telling Israelis he is the only adult in the room is now asking the president to save him from his own corruption trial before the verdict even arrives, and nothing else explains why he reached for a pardon with no admission of guilt – flat refusing even now to go there - in the middle of an ongoing case when every adviser knows that move screams panic, not strength. So lets start by laying out Netanyahu’s behaviour here, because it tells you more than any speech he gives, and the behaviour is astonishing for anyone who has followed Netanyahu’s career long enough to recognise how tightly he usually controls the story around him because he doesn’t do public vulnerability, he doesn’t ask for favours unless he’s cornered, and he certainly doesn’t put himself in a position where the presidency can visibly rule on his political survival, yet that is precisely what he has done, and the timing matters because the trial hasn’t collapsed, the prosecution hasn’t faltered, and his legal team hasn’t found a clean way out, which is why this whole pardon gambit lands like a confession written in the margins.
The mechanics of a presidential pardon in Israel aren’t complicated, I won’t go over this in detail again, because I did it the other day, but they do depend on one basic principle: it is not supposed to be a get-out-of-jail-free card for a politician who hasn’t even been convicted yet, so for Netanyahu to submit a request without admitting guilt, without expressing remorse, and without stepping aside is a complete inversion of every precedent that exists, and you see how abnormal it is because the last time a president granted clemency in a comparable security scandal the officers involved had confessed, shown remorse, and resigned, and that matters because institutional legitimacy in Israel is thin at the best of times, and the presidency has survived as one of the few positions that can still claim moral authority precisely because it is not supposed to be dragged into the prime minister’s personal legal mess, which is why Isaac Herzog now sits at the centre of a storm he didn’t create, because Netanyahu is essentially asking him to shred the remaining credibility of the legal system in order to protect him from a trial that has already run for years and is entering the part he fears most.
But when roughly four hundred retired police officers, including former commissioners and senior commanders, step forward publicly and tell the president not to pardon the sitting prime minister because doing so could ignite severe violence, you pay attention because these people don’t normally enter the political arena with this level of force, and the language they used shows they understand the stakes better than anyone, because they didn’t just warn about public disorder, they told Herzog there was “not even a hint of admission of guilt” in Netanyahu’s request and reminded him of his own father’s legacy, the former Israeli President Chaim Herzog – and the pardon he gave, which I nodded to a moment ago, which was given after the fact, to secret service officers involved in the killing of four Palestinians who had been taken alive after apparently hijacked a bus, the Bus 300 affair, if you want to do some further reading. They had been taken alive and later killed. They got clemency from Chaim Herzog in exchange for their resignations, I can’t see Netanyahu agreeing to that, when he sells himself as the only person capable of keeping Israel safe. That phrase “not even a hint of admission of guilt” is doing a lot of work because it ties the current president to a historical moment when clemency, as handed out by his own father, was conditional on truth and responsibility, and the officers are saying outright that Netanyahu is asking Herzog to abandon that legacy, bend the system, and participate in a political pardon rather than an act of justice, and that sort of public institutional pressure is rare because it signals that the people who once enforced the state’s authority no longer trust the man running the government to obey the rules that bind everyone else.
Herzog can feel that pressure, and you can see why he’s being deliberately cautious because the presidency is now the last line between Netanyahu and a total collapse of accountability, and any decision he makes will define not just Netanyahu’s future but the institution itself, which is why his office has already described the request as extraordinary, because presidents don’t usually need to spell out that something is extraordinary unless they’re marking out a boundary, and boundaries are exactly what Netanyahu has spent years trampling because he has always assumed he could push institutions until they bent towards him, so watching him reach a point where he needs one of those institutions to save him is all the more revealing because it shows he no longer believes he can win on the merits of the case.
You then add the fact that Netanyahu didn’t just file the request and hope for the best because he phoned Donald Trump afterwards and asked him for more help, and this is where the mask really slips because Netanyahu has spent his entire political life selling the idea that he shapes American presidents rather than leans on them, yet here he is asking the current President of the United States to intervene in his domestic corruption trial, and Trump did what he always does when someone reaches from a position of weakness: he declined to commit to anything concrete and offered a vague line about the issue “working out”, which is the sort of answer he gives when he wants the appearance of influence without taking on any of the responsibility, and the fact Netanyahu made that call at all shows how far his confidence has fallen because turning to foreign political pressure in a criminal case at home is something you do only when you know you’ve run out of levers inside your own system.
The problem for Netanyahu is that Trump’s involvement backfired immediately because it looks, to many Israelis, like outside political pressure on a domestic criminal case, especially when it comes from a former American president with his own legal baggage, so what was supposed to be a demonstration of strength became another red flag for Herzog and another sign to the public that Netanyahu is scrambling, and it also handed his critics a clean argument: if you need an American politician to pressure your own president into pardoning you, then you know your trial isn’t going well, and this is where the wider political scene starts shifting because even Likud insiders are now described as anxious, and they’re anxious because their entire political project has been built around Netanyahu’s personal dominance, and the minute he looks beatable the whole structure looks beatable, because power in Israel’s right-wing bloc has calcified around one man for two decades, and when that man starts phoning Trump to save him, the aura breaks.
So you look at the legal side again because that’s where this all started, and you see reports that Netanyahu’s lawyers are worried about damaging testimony, which aligns perfectly with his behaviour because nobody asks for a pre-verdict pardon while believing the next phase of the trial is going to clear them, and nobody tries to short-circuit a legal process they think they can win, so the pardon request reads less like an act of strategy and more like a man trying to outrun the inevitable, and the lack of admission of guilt in the request tells you everything about the bind he’s in because admitting guilt would destroy him politically while refusing to admit guilt destroys his chance of clemency, so he has tried to do both and ended up doing neither, which is a pattern we’ve seen in leaders who have operated without accountability for so long that they forget the system can still function without them.
Public reaction has been immediate and furious, and you only need to look at protests outside the president’s residence to see how far the country’s patience has stretched, because people don’t dress up and march at night to defend a legal system they believe is already compromised unless they think the prime minister is now trying to take the whole thing down with him, and the symbolism of a “banana republic” protest hits at the heart of the problem because Israelis have watched institutions weaken under Netanyahu for years, from his attacks on the judiciary to his smears against the police, and now those same institutions are being asked to protect him from consequences, which is the point where people decide enough is enough, because even in countries that tolerate a high level of political chaos there is a limit to how openly a leader can manipulate the justice system in his own favour.
Herzog knows all of this, and the presidency has always relied on a particular kind of political insulation, and you can see how he has positioned himself so far: he’s not saying no, but he’s making it clear that this is not a routine request, and when you’re dealing with a man like Netanyahu whose entire political identity is built on projecting inevitability, Herzog’s silence hits almost as hard as a refusal because it leaves Netanyahu hanging in the air, which is the one place he never likes to be, and you can see the panic in how quickly he has been trying to shape the narrative, talking about national unity and healing divisions as if a pardon is more important to the country than resolving the corruption charges he has been fighting for half a decade.
This is where the deeper mechanics come in because this isn’t just a political story, it’s a structural one, and if a sitting prime minister can bypass a trial he has fought tooth-and-nail to obstruct and get a president to wipe the slate clean without guilt, remorse, or resignation, then the rule of law means nothing, and everyone knows it, and that is exactly why the retired police officers stepped in, because they can see the institutional threat better than most, and they know what it looks like when a political class tries to break the system to protect its leader, and their intervention has now made it much harder for Herzog to grant the pardon even if he wanted to, because the minute that letter landed the entire conversation changed from “should he grant it” to “can he survive granting it”, and that is an entirely different calculation.
So when you zoom out and look at the whole picture, what you see is a man who has spent twenty years dodging consequences suddenly behaving like he expects to hit the wall, a man who once boasted of his strength now phoning Trump for rescue, a man who claimed to embody the state now asking the state to rewrite its principles to protect him, and you realise this is the first time in two decades that Netanyahu is acting like he knows he’s going to lose, because nothing else explains the scale of the move, the timing of it, or the chaos it has unleashed, and you can sense that everyone around him knows it too because the gloves are coming off, the institutions are speaking up, and the public is no longer willing to let him twist the law into whatever shape suits him.
You end up seeing a picture of a man who has built his political identity on always winning now confronted with the one arena he cannot control, a courtroom that doesn’t care about political survival or foreign alliances or legacy speeches, and that is why he reached for the pardon, because that courtroom has been inching towards him for years, and he can feel it closing in, and the panic is no longer something he can hide, because every attempt to mask it only exposes it further, which is why this whole saga lands like the beginning of the end rather than just another Netanyahu manoeuvre, and the presidency now holds the final card, and whatever Herzog does will shape Israeli politics for years, but the real story today is simpler: Netanyahu is not acting like a man in control, he’s acting like a man who sees the verdict coming and has run out of ways to outrun it.
This story is shaping up to be a major legal showdown in Israel, get more details on this story right here.
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