There is a moment when corruption stops being a scandal and becomes a form of government.

It does not always arrive with bags of cash, crude threats, or theatrical criminality. More often, it arrives through proximity: a chief of staff, an adviser, a loyal aide, a family business, a discreet investor, a friendly media channel, a conveniently blurred boundary between public office and private advantage. The old word for this was court. The modern word is administration. The mechanism is the same.

The reported move by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to indict Tzachi Braverman, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for obstruction of justice and fraud and breach of trust, pending a hearing, should therefore not be treated as an isolated legal episode. It belongs to a much larger political pathology. The affair concerns an investigation into an alleged leak of classified documents, including material reportedly passed to foreign media. Legally, these are suspicions and prospective charges, not convictions. Politically, however, the pattern is already visible: the inner circle of power appears again as a zone where loyalty to the ruler may become more important than loyalty to the state.

This is where Israel should look across the ocean — not because America explains Israel, but because the Trump orbit has become one of the most advanced contemporary laboratories of this disease.

Around Donald Trump, the boundary between public office and private enrichment has long been systematically blurred. Recent financial disclosures revealed thousands of stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million, involving........

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