Ehud Barak says Netanyahu is ‘finished,’ predicts Likud will turn on him
‘The cracks in support run deep,’ says former PM, noting with new elections Netanyahu will not have time to pass legislation to protect him from corruption charges
Former prime minister Ehud Barak on Friday said that he believes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “basically finished” and that members of his Likud party will turn on him after the September elections.
“Netanyahu has clearly failed. No government was formed [after the last elections] and there will not be any legislation to give him immunity or to override [the Supreme Court’s authority],” the Ynet news site quoted Barak as saying at a conference.
“If the attorney general doesn’t waver again, the hearing will happen before the establishment of a new government,” said Barak.
Israeli TV reported Thursday that state prosecutors will reportedly reject any request by Netanyahu’s lawyers to defer his pre-indictment hearing on three corruption cases beyond its scheduled date at the start of October.
The reports Thursday night also said that the attorney general is aiming to wrap up the Netanyahu cases before the end of the year. If so, Netanyahu, who on Wednesday night called new elections for September 17 — having failed to build a governing majority after the April 9 elections — may not now have time to pass planned legislation aimed at protecting him from prosecution.
Netanyahu is facing indictment on three counts of fraud and breach of trust, and one of bribery, pending the hearing — his final opportunity to persuade the attorney general not to file charges against him. The hearing was originally set for July, but was postponed earlier this month to October 2-3, with the possibility of a final session a week later.
The prime minister’s lawyers had sought a full year’s delay — a request that was dismissed by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, who ruled that a speedy resolution of the matter was in the public interest.
“When you ask people inside Likud, ‘why are you sticking with him, he’s basically finished,’ they say ‘let him bring in the votes and then afterwards we will see,'” said Barak, who also served as defense minister under Netanyahu, but who has become one of his most vociferous critics in recent years. “The cracks in support run deep in the home.”
Barak’s assessment echoes murmurings of discontent in the Likud reported late Thursday by Zman Yisrael, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew news site.
“Why did we need to get to a situation like this?” one senior official said angrily. “After all, it was clear to everyone that Netanyahu was limited [in his options for forming a coalition]. He doesn’t have any power to maneuver among the right-wing parties. If I was head of Likud, or anyone else, I would have assembled a government in a couple of days. All the gates were open to me. For him, everything is closed.”
Netanyahu is widely reported to have tried to build a coalition after April 9’s election in which his Likud MKs and their allies would initiate or back legislative efforts to enable him to avoid prosecution — first by easing his path to gaining immunity via the Knesset, and then by canceling the Supreme Court’s authority to overturn such immunity.
This latter change would be achieved as part of a wide-ranging reform of the Supreme Court’s role, under which Israel’s justices would be denied their current quasi-constitutional authority to “override” legislation, and Knesset and government decisions, deemed unconstitutional. Plans for this “override” legislation have been described as marking a potential constitutional revolution in Israel, that would shatter the checks and balances at the heart of Israeli democracy.
Earlier this week, as Netanyahu struggled to muster a majority coalition, his associates were said to have warned him that snap elections would likely deny him the time needed to pass legislation shielding him from prosecution. Nonetheless, on Wednesday night, when he concluded that he could not muster a majority, he pushed through a vote to disperse the 21st Knesset, which was only sworn in a month ago, and set Israel on the path to new elections on September 17. He chose this course rather than allow for a different Knesset member, possibly opposition leader Benny Gantz, to have a turn at trying to build a majority coalition.
Netanyahu is widely expected to now seek a delay in the hearing process, by arguing that the recourse to new elections means he will not have sufficient time to prepare for the October hearing. “He chose to support new elections,” Channel 12 quoted a legal official saying in response. “That’s up to him.”
Mandelblit announced his intention to indict Netanyahu for fraud and breach of trust in the three cases against him, and for bribery in one of them, in February. The prime minister’s attorneys requested, and were granted, that the case files not be handed over prior to the April 9 national election in order to prevent information from leaking to the media and affecting the vote.
But after the election, the lawyers refrained for another month from collecting the material, citing a dispute over their fees. They have been accused of engaging in delay tactics.
Netanyahu denies all the allegations against him, and has claimed they stem from a witch hunt designed to oust him, which he claims is supported by the left-wing opposition, the media, the police and the state prosecution, headed by a “weak” attorney general.
Case 1000 involves accusations that Netanyahu received gifts and benefits from billionaire benefactors including Israeli-born Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan in exchange for favors; Case 2000 involves accusations that Netanyahu agreed with Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper publisher Arnon Mozes to weaken a rival daily in return for more favorable coverage from Yedioth; and Case 4000, widely seen as the most serious against the premier, involves accusations that Netanyahu advanced regulatory decisions that benefited Shaul Elovitch, the controlling shareholder in the Bezeq telecom giant, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, in exchange for positive coverage from its Walla news site.
The Times of Israel Community.