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.
Mr. Netanyahu’s move against the Shin Bet chief came weeks after his administration announced plans to fire the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, an apolitical judicial official appointed by the previous government who has frustrated Mr. Netanyahu by blocking some of his decisions on legal grounds.
Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu is seeking to rein in domestic watchdogs and judicial authorities that, like in the United States, have pursued investigations against him or his allies.
Like Mr. Trump, the Israeli prime minister has faced criminal charges that he says are false claims fomented by left-leaning and unelected bureaucrats. In Mr. Netanyahu’s case, he is standing trial in a yearslong corruption case that requires him to appear in court several times a month.
“Trump’s own illiberalism has given Netanyahu an unprecedented opportunity to impose his own on Israel,” said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Trump’s popularity in Israel and the Vulcan mind meld between Trump and Netanyahu on undermining the independence of the courts, and fighting the ‘woke left’ protects and energizes Netanyahu.”
Mr. Miller said Mr. Netanyahu had long taken cues from other authoritarian leaders, like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. And Mr. Netanyahu’s battle against what he calls the “deep state” predates Mr. Trump’s presidency.
He was first questioned by the police about the corruption charges in early 2017, weeks before Mr. Trump took office for his first term. When Mr. Netanyahu’s trial began in 2020, he stood on the steps of the court in Jerusalem, accusing the prosecution, the police and the media establishment of a joint attempt “to thwart the will of the people.” He is accused of granting regulatory favors to businessmen and media moguls in exchange for gifts and favorable news coverage, which he denies.
The prime minister’s formal attempts to undermine judicial power began in 2022, when his coalition government introduced legislation intended to limit the power of the Supreme Court and give the government more control over the appointment of its judges. After mass protests, the government suspended most of these moves for more than a year.
But Mr. Netanyahu appears galvanized after Mr. Trump’s election in November. Since then, his government revived the overhaul of the judicial appointments process and is pushing the bill through Parliament.
One Israeli official briefed on Mr. Netanyahu’s thinking said that Mr. Trump’s election had given the prime minister greater confidence to take provocative steps at home and in the war in Gaza, which escalated this week after the collapse of a cease-fire deal that had been brokered earlier this year. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity.
For his part, Mr. Trump has found common cause with other illiberal leaders like Mr. Orban, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Trump said this month that Mr. Putin “went through a hell of a lot with me,” referring to the F.B.I’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
It was in the midst of that investigation when Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I director who had refused to publicly clear him of any ties to Russia. Mr. Comey had also refused to give in to Mr. Trump’s pressure to drop an F.B.I. investigation into Michael T. Flynn, the former White House national security adviser.
Eight years later, Mr. Netanyahu persuaded his cabinet to fire Mr. Bar, despite large street protests in Jerusalem this week denouncing his threats to remove the Shin Bet chief. On Friday, Israel’s Supreme Court issued an injunction freezing Mr. Bar’s dismissal until the justices could hear petitions that had been filed against it.
Alon Pinkas, a political commentator and Israel’s former consul-general in New York, said it was doubtful Mr. Netanyahu would have moved against the Shin Bet chief had Mr. Trump not been president. The two leaders were kindred spirits politically, he said, and had “both adopted an identical language that would make George Orwell cringe with envy.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu also regularly use this language to discredit the news media, another institution they often view with contempt. Israel’s national broadcaster, Kan, reported this week that it was during a meeting with Mr. Trump in Washington last month when Mr. Netanyahu was inspired to fire Mr. Bar.
Asked to comment on that report, Mr. Netanyahu’s spokesman, Omer Dostri, responded with a terse text message: “fake news.”
