The threat to Israel’s prosperity

If you want to understand the economic riskiness and moral fraudulence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s headlong rush to ram through a total overhaul of Israel’s judicial system and put it under his thumb while he faces corruption charges, you just need to study two statistics and ask one question.

The two statistics: The Economist ranked Israel as the fourthbest-performing economy in 2022 among OECD countries. And in 2020, Israel ranked 19th among the economies in the world, making the top 20 for the first time in its history, based on GDP per capita — ahead of Canada, New Zealand and Britain.

That’s right: Israel has been enjoying a quiet economic miracle in the past few decades, and no Israeli leader deserves more credit for that than Netanyahu. During his previous 15 years as prime minister, he did a superb job, in my view, helping to transform Israel into the world’s leading startup nation. He put in place smart economic policies to attract investors. He would go anywhere and talk to anyone (except me!) to promote the Israeli economy. And he played a key role in providing government resources so Israel’s high-tech community could forge world-leading positions in cybersecurity technologies, water conservation, solar energy and digital health.

So you cannot be surprised that many global and Israeli investors are looking at Israel today and asking this simple question: If the Israeli legal system that has gradually and collaboratively evolved over the past 75 years was so awful — so in need of emergency radical surgery overnight, without any national debate — how did it help produce and guard the Israeli economic miracle of the past 20 years that Netanyahu always, and justifiably, takes credit for and has made Israel’s middle class amazingly prosperous?

Nothing is more dangerous to Israel’s continued prosperity than Netanyahu’s inability today to give a credible answer to that simple question.

Because in the absence of a credible answer, the only thing one can believe — the only thing foreign investors increasingly believe — is that the whole process is being driven by a small group of far-right authoritarian ideologues, an extremist right-wing think tank inspired by the Federalist Society in America and a prime minister who seems so desperate to escape from his trial on 2020 charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust that he is ready to change the rules of the entire Israeli Monopoly game to secure his own