Law, Power, and Justice

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/world/middleeast/israel-benjamin-netanyahu-decisions.html

Mr. Netanyahu’s criminal trial on charges of bribery and fraud is inexorably advancing. President Trump’s peace plan for Gaza is inching along toward a difficult Phase 2, and tensions are building with the White House over Israel’s actions in Syria and Lebanon. And polls indicate Mr. Netanyahu is headed to defeat in next year’s elections.

the Israeli right, Mr. Netanyahu’s political base, which is agitating for him to pursue annexation of the Israeli-occupied West Bank despite Mr. Trump’s warnings that doing so would trigger a harsh U.S. response.

If he wants to maintain his decades-old political alliance with Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, one of Mr. Netanyahu’s first tasks is to try to meet its demand for a law granting yeshiva students a new exemption from the draft, after an old exemption expired and the Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that they were legally obligated to serve.

A new exemption would be wildly unpopular with the vast majority of Israelis, who have been exhausted by the Gaza war’s demands on conscripts and reservists alike over the past two years.

Those opposing the exemption include members of Mr. Netanyahu’s own Likud party.

If Parliament does not enact the exemption, his government could collapse, precipitating elections early next year.

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, said he believed Mr. Netanyahu wanted time for the Israeli public to vent its rage over a new ultra-Orthodox draft exemption but then also to get over it, and for the discussion to shift to other topics.

“It’s difficult,” Mr. Plesner said. “But if Netanyahu decides that the coalition needs to pass it, it will probably pass.”

But Mr. Netanyahu is counting on the ultra-Orthodox and the extreme-right parties to back his efforts to overhaul the judicial system to curb the power of the courts — something that opponents say would give Parliament far too much unchecked power and allow Mr. Netanyahu to legislate himself out of legal jeopardy.