Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares two important characteristics with former President Donald Trump: like Trump, Netanyahu is narcissistic, incapable of empathy for others who considers his personal interests and political survival to be of paramount importance, and, also like Trump, he desperately wants Trump to win the forthcoming presidential election in order for him to have a hope of staying out of jail.
That is pretty much all we need to know to explain Netanyahu’s behavior some two months before the said election.
Trump’s motivation is hardly breaking news. Most Americans—even hardcore MAGA activists who idolize Trump—understand that Trump’s legal difficulties will either increase or decrease exponentially depending on who takes the oath of office next Jan. 21 as the 47th president of the United States. One scenario: he lives in the White House for another four years; the other involves at a minimum heavy fines and quite possibly an orange prison uniform.
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What many observers outside Israel don’t realize, however, is that Trump’s Mini-Me Netanyahu is in the exact same boat.
Except that Netanyahu’s situation is even more precarious than Trump’s.
Netanyahu’s present political situation is exemplified by the banana peel syndrome: he has one foot in political oblivion and the other on a banana peel.
Like Trump, Netanyahu is under multiple criminal indictments and his various trials are ongoing. These trials would accelerate with bullet train speed were he to be forced out of office anytime soon.
Which brings into play the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Netanyahu has good reason to believe that fellow autocrat Trump will have little interest in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which perforce means bringing the present Israel-Hamas war in Gaza to some sort of end. One of Trump’s principal advisers when it comes to Israel is former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman who supports ultranationalist Jewish claims to the West Bank and opposes a two-state solution, that is to say, any form of statehood for the Palestinians, ever.
The financial support of one of Trump’s mega-donors, billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Miriam Adelson, the widow of Macau casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is reportedly conditioned on Trump allowing Israel to annex the West Bank combined with U.S. recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over all of that territory. To say that this is the utopian dream of not just Netanyahu but the entire coterie of right-wing extremists propping up his government would be the understatement of the year. Such a development, which goes counter to U.S. policy under multiple Democratic and Republican administrations, would also bring any prospect of not just Israeli-Palestinian peace but of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence to a screeching halt.
All of which explains why Netanyahu does not want an agreement for any kind of ceasefire in the Hamas-Israel war and the return of those hostages taken captive by Hamas on Oct. 7 who are still alive. He knows that the day after such an agreement is reached, he will be unable to withstand calls for new elections, which he could well lose.
How else could one explain his callous comments to the families of the hostages? He trivialized the Oct. 7 pogrom by saying, as recorded on a leaked audio, that “during the Holocaust, they committed ‘October 7’ 4,500 times every single day.” As far as he was concerned, he told the anguished families, his professed concern for what he called “the future of the State of Israel” trumped rescuing the hostages.
Last month, Netanyahu reportedly said at a cabinet meeting that Israel need not be anxious to reach a deal because “The hostages are suffering but they are not dying.” Tell that to the families of the dead hostages whose bodies have been recovered.
What Netanyahu has successfully accomplished so far is to run out the clock.
By all rights, he should have been forced to resign immediately after Oct. 7 when his responsibility for that day’s carnage was evident.
After all, he had allowed Hamas to be funded to the tune of billions of dollars since becoming prime minister in 2009, a position he has held ever since with the exception of one year when he was out of power. And it was Netanyahu who allowed the security of the kibbutzim and towns on the Israel-Gaza border to be compromised by shifting military units to the West Bank at the insistence of his fascisti-like coalition partners. And it was he who believed that by allowing Hamas to control Gaza, he would be able to continue avoiding talking with the Palestinian Authority about any kind of political path forward.
And yet, Netanyahu, like Trump, is psychologically, perhaps congenitally, incapable of ever admitting that he might, just might, have made a mistake. As far as Netanyahu is concerned, everyone else is responsible for anything and everything that went wrong on Oct. 7 and since, but never him.
And so, Netanyahu can be expected to continue trying to manipulate the world as he has done with an unfortunate degree of success over the course of the past 11 months. Except that he knows that Vice President Kamala Harris has his number. She is a former prosecutor, after all, and just as she has dealt with the likes of Donald Trump, she has bested antagonists who were far more sophisticated and less transparent than Netanyahu.
Harris made clear in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention that, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on October 7th. Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.”
This is why Netanyahu must be panicking at this very moment. In many ways, Harris must be his worst nightmare. He realizes, I’m sure, that while she is very much a friend and supporter of Israel, she is neither in his pocket nor a pushover—which he probably considers Trump to be in light of their past history.
And this is why Netanyahu is panicked at the prospect of a Harris presidency. She is certain not to allow him to continue running roughshod at the expense of the majority of Israelis who want him gone and the non-Hamas-supporting Palestinians who see no hope for any future while he is in control.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.