The comparison between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump is usually made at the level of temperament and rhetoric. Both attack the press, denounce prosecutors and judges, and present themselves as victims of entrenched elites. All of this is accurate, but it is also the least interesting part of the comparison.

The deeper similarity lies elsewhere. Both have understood that contemporary power does not need to abolish democratic institutions. It needs only to change the conditions under which those institutions can act. Courts may continue to sit, parliaments may continue to legislate, elections may still be held, regulators may retain their names, and commissions may continue to publish reports, preferably in buildings with functioning air-conditioning and no remaining authority. What disappears is not the institution itself, but its capacity to make refusal consequential.

Israel offers one of the clearest implementations of this mechanism. The Netanyahu government has not staged a military coup. The Knesset has not been dissolved by force, the army has not seized power, and elections have not been formally cancelled. Instead, the transformation has proceeded through the system itself. Legislation, coalition discipline, appointments, dismissals, administrative paralysis and attacks on judicial authority have performed, step by step, the work that an older coup would have attempted in a single night.

A traditional coup suspends the system from outside. The Israeli project works from within it. It does not declare that law no longer applies; it seeks to determine which law applies, who may interpret it and whether an adverse judgment must be obeyed. This is a more sophisticated political technology, and also a tidier one: fewer tanks, more committees.

No political project can become real outside the institutional machinery that translates decisions into consequences. Governments require law, budgets, appointments, enforcement, public information and administrative continuity. Oppositions require the same infrastructure if they are ever to replace a government and make their own programmes effective. Whoever controls that machinery controls more than the present government; he shapes the conditions under which any future government will be able to act.

The central question is therefore not only whether Netanyahu remains in office, but what kind of state his successors will inherit. A weakened attorney general, a politicised appointment system, a judiciary whose authority has been openly contested, regulators accustomed to paralysis, security institutions pressured toward personal loyalty and inquiries shaped by those they are meant to investigate do not........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)