President Isaac Herzog has spent recent weeks quietly encouraging the parties involved in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial to consider a plea bargain. The Right has called it surrender. The Left has called it a sellout. Both are wrong, and Herzog is doing exactly what a president is supposed to do.
The trial began in May 2020. Cases 1000, 2000, and 4000 have produced thousands of pages of testimony, dozens of witnesses, and a body of evidence the public has had years to evaluate.
The bribery charge in Case 4000, which centers on alleged regulatory favors to Bezeq’s Shaul Elovitch in exchange for favorable Walla coverage, remains the heaviest count and carries the most serious sentencing exposure. Cases 1000 and 2000 add fraud and breach of trust. None of this will look meaningfully clearer in 2028 than it does today.
What changes is Israel. The country has spent six years organizing its politics around a single defendant. Coalitions have been built and broken over him. Two judicial overhaul fights, a war on seven fronts, the October 7 massacre inquiry, the hostage families’ agony – all of it has been processed through a national lens warped by one open courtroom.
That is not a healthy condition for a democracy, and pretending otherwise is its own form of denial.
Herzog’s critics on the Right argue that any plea deal validates a prosecution they consider illegitimate. Their answer is acquittal or nothing. But acquittal is not on offer, and “nothing” means another three to five years of the same trial that has already failed to produce the vindication they keep promising is around the corner.
His critics on the Left argue that a plea bargain lets Netanyahu escape full accountability. Their answer is conviction or nothing. But conviction is not guaranteed either, and “nothing” means another three to five years in which the man they want held accountable continues to dominate Israeli politics from the defendant’s bench.
The maximalist position on both sides protects a principle and sacrifices the country. A plea deal does the opposite. It accepts an imperfect outcome in exchange for a real one.
Terms of a possible plea deal
The terms are the whole argument, and the right terms are not difficult to identify. Netanyahu would have to plead to charges carrying moral turpitude – the legal designation that triggers a seven-year ban from public office. Anything less is a giveaway. Anything more, such as prison time on the bribery count, would be rejected by his side and is not necessary to achieve what the country needs: a recorded admission of wrongdoing and a clean exit from political life.
That is the deal Herzog is reportedly trying to shape. That is the deal Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara should be willing to negotiate. Closure with consequences. Not vengeance. Not vindication.
The Israeli presidency is a strange institution. Almost no executive power and almost unlimited symbolic authority. Herzog has used that authority carefully throughout his term – on the judicial overhaul, on the hostage deal, on the relationship with the Diaspora. He is using it carefully again now. Where the prime minister has politicized the trial, and the opposition has politicized the prosecution, Herzog has done the unfashionable thing and tried to solve the problem.
His detractors will say a president should not be involved in a criminal matter at all. That argument misreads both the office and the moment. Herzog is not directing prosecutors or pressuring judges. He is doing what Israeli presidents have always done at hinge points: convening, persuading, and absorbing political risk that elected officials cannot or will not absorb themselves.
Chaim Herzog did it. Shimon Peres did it. Reuven Rivlin did it during the post-election deadlocks. The presidency without that function is ceremonial furniture.
The Knesset writes laws. The courts apply them. When the system locks up, the president is supposed to find the way out.
Herzog is finding it. The maximalists on both flanks would rather the country remain frozen than accept a resolution that fails to humiliate the other side. The Jerusalem Post rejects that logic. Six years is enough. A negotiated ending that bars Netanyahu from office and registers his admission of wrongdoing is not a betrayal of justice. It is justice arriving in the only form still available.
Herzog deserves the country’s full support. He has ours.
