The American and Israeli leaders have been mirroring each other as they go to war with their own governments
If it wasn’t obvious that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel believes he has an ally in his battle against the country’s attorney general, its judges and even the head of its domestic security service, he made it clear on Wednesday evening.
“In America and in Israel, when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will,” he wrote in a social media post. “They won’t win in either place! We stand strong together.”
The defiant, Trumpian blast was the latest evidence that Mr. Netanyahu and President Trump are running the same playbook to achieve strikingly similar goals: to neuter the judiciary, dismantle a system of oversight that puts a check on their authority and discredit national security professionals they see as arrayed against them.
These moves come as Mr. Trump has aligned his Middle East policy squarely to benefit Mr. Netanyahu, including giving the Israeli prime minister freedom to renew the war in Gaza and launching U.S. airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen, a group that is an avowed enemy of Israel.
In just this week in Washington, Mr. Trump called for the impeachment of a federal judge who was seeking basic information about his mass deportation efforts, fired two Democratic commissioners of an independent trade commission and was rebuked by a judge who said his administration’s gutting of the agency in charge of foreign aid most likely violated the Constitution.
This week in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet fired Ronen Bar, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the F.B.I, after the agency started investigations into the prime minister’s aides. Among other claims, the aides are accused of mishandling classified information and leaking a document to a foreign newspaper. Mr. Netanyahu’s office has strongly denied the allegations.