Volodymyr Zelenskyy made headlines again Sunday by firing a deputy infrastructure minister suspected of bribery.
"I want this to be clear: There will be no return to what used to be in the past," the Ukrainian president said, referring to his country's richly deserved reputation for corruption. The minister is suspected of being part of a group that was taking bribes in exchange for equipment and machinery purchasing contracts.
Also on Sunday, another world leader fired another corrupt official -- but the story here is completely different.
Benjamin Netanyahu was ordered by the Israeli Supreme Court to remove a convicted tax fraud, Aryeh Deri, from serving as both minister of health and minister of interior. The prime minister complied "with a heavy heart," as he put it in a letter to Deri that he read aloud in a cabinet meeting.
What a contrast. Amid a desperate war of national survival, Zelenskyy is waging a campaign to kick the crooks out of government. And in a desperate bid to remain in office, Netanyahu is waging a campaign to keep the crooks in.
For years, I had ambivalent views about Netanyahu. He is not a likable guy. Many of his political opponents were once his ideological soul mates but were turned off by his lack of scruples.
The upside of Netanyahu was that he was good at his job. Israel prospered economically under his tenure. It established flourishing ties with former adversaries in Africa and the Arab world. It greatly diminished Iran's power in Syria without triggering all-out war. And despite his reputation as a right-wing flamethrower, he usually governed closer to the center than the fringe.
For these reasons, I once called Netanyahu the Richard Nixon of Israel. But that turned out to be deeply unkind -- to Nixon. At least there were limits to what the 37th president was willing to do to the system of constitutional government to keep himself in office.
Nothing similar can be said of Netanyahu, who is now using his four-seat parliamentary majority to push through a radical overhaul of the judiciary that would allow the Knesset to overturn Supreme Court verdicts with just a one-vote parliamentary majority. American conservatives inclined to support Netanyahu might ask themselves how they would feel about a system in which Chuck Schumer could use his one-seat Senate majority to overrule rulings of the Supreme Court, such as the Dobbs decision on abortion.
The point is important for Israel, which lacks a formal written constitution and the usual separations of power that help guarantee minority rights in the face of majoritarian rule. As one Israeli leader put it in 2012, "The difference between countries in which rights are only on paper and those in which there are actual rights -- that difference is a strong, independent court," without which "rights cannot be protected."
The name of that Israeli leader: Netanyahu.
What changed? Netanyahu got himself into legal trouble, giving him a personal interest in bringing the judiciary to heel. He has also moved along the current of illiberal democracy whose other champions include Hungary's Viktor Orban and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro. Hyperpersonalized, populist rule achieved by gutting institutional checks and balances is how democracies devolve into mobocracies. It's why America's Founding Fathers built our system the way they did.
After Israel's last election, I wrote that it was wrong to say that Israel faced impending fascism. I still think that's right. But if Israel is to persevere, it also must maintain the moral respect of its honest friends. Too bad for it that today, the Jewish people's greatest leader resides in Kyiv, Ukraine, rather than Jerusalem.
The New York Times