There is a peculiar moment in the life of every democracy when the language of national healing begins to sound suspiciously more like the language of convenience, and Israel has certainly reached it. Netanyahu’s plea for a presidential pardon does raise the question: could pardoning the prime minister actually be good for the country, considering his government’s failings?

Supporters of clemency think so, and their case deserves to be taken seriously before it is dismantled. Their argument is not incoherent; after months of street protests and a war that has pushed Israeli society to all sorts of limits, the country is simply exhausted. The legal process against Netanyahu, sprawling against three separate corruption cases, continues to inflame national fracture lines, and, as the argument goes, a pardon would most definitely lower the national temperature by a few degrees. Proponents often point to past Israeli pardons – Moshe Katsav’s sentence being shortened, or the clemency granted in the aftermath of the Altalena affair – as proof that Israel has occasionally used forgiveness as a stabilising tool.

Israel is dependent on the United States in ways rarely admitted aloud, and this is the geopolitical dimension. With Trump back in the White........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)