Los Angeles Times

Commentary: What Netanyahu and Israelis learned from the Trump playbook

An Israeli carries a poster representing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a demonstration against the government's controversial justice reform bill in Tel Aviv on March 4, 2023.

Early in 2019, as Israel was heading into a divisive parliamentary election, a massive campaign poster along a Tel Aviv freeway showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands with President Donald Trump. Now, five such elections and one near-civil war later, that same highway has been repeatedly blocked by protesters against Netanyahu’s plan to place the country’s Supreme Court under his political control.

Nothing could be more grimly appropriate to the crisis of democracy in Israel than the notion of Trump’s image looming over it. For however much the turmoil

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