Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu was right when he said the cases against him were unraveling. Yet this is not the reason he refrained from signing a plea deal at this time. The fact that he didn't sign a plea deal doesn't mean he won't sign one in the future.
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Netanyahu's trial will be held in a few years. The plea deal option may present itself once again later down the line. The current Attorney General, Avichai Mendelblit, is invested in the case, and it wouldn't be a stretch to say his professional future depends on it. Mendelblit acted in weakness when he agreed to open the investigation and decided to file an indictment. He is now showing the same weakness on the eve of his retirement and transition to a jurist waiting to be made chief justice.
The next attorney general could be far less committed to convicting Netanyahu and more attentive to what transpires in the court, where the law enforcement system is breaking down into fragments by the day, as revelations of wrongdoing, deceptive interrogation methods, and the distortion of the law have become a matter of routine. In this sense, the longer the trial goes on, the better, as this would allow the important testimonies of people like Shlomo Filber, Ari Harrow, and Netanyahu himself to also be heard.
In recent years, the judicial issue and the need to fix the justice and law enforcement systems have become a central issue for Likud party supporters. Cutting the trial short would have set the largest party in the Knesset years back, as the issue was not a concern for the party heads at all. It may even be that the opposite is true and that they took care to establish the justices' and legal advisers rule, watched as former Chief Justice Aharon Barak carried out a revolution in the 1990s and did not promote any law or reform to ensure the proper government order remained intact.
A plea deal would not only have prevented the system in question from learning the necessary lesson, but it would also have taught politicians a very different lesson: that there are issues that cannot be touched, and that if they succeeded in taking down the most popular prime minister Israel has had in the last decade, they would succeed in taking down anyone who dared to challenge their hegemony. It doesn't matter if it was someone driven in their mission like Likud MKs Yariv Levin or Amir Ohana or a self-declared reformist and serial groveler like former Likud member and now New Hope party head Gideon Sa'ar. The fact that no plea deal was signed has spared them having to deal with the issue for now.
The politician with the most to gain is Naftali Bennett. The premier knew a plea deal would turn everything upside down and destroy the coalition. The biggest losers are the candidates for Likud party leadership, who believed they would have their turn any minute. Some of them were so confident this was the case that they rushed to give their motives away. Their premature moves ended in failure in further proof that in politics, sometimes, timing is everything.
Coalition members, both senior officials and ministers, all revealed their cowardice when, as soon as talk toward a plea deal was reported, they rushed to establish a state commission of inquiry into the submarine affair. This was aimed to send Netanyahu the message that while he may be able to close a plea deal with Mendelblit, the persecution will continue. When there is only one thing keeping the government together, the coalition must reaffirm its cohesiveness through yet another anti-Netanyahu initiative. Otherwise, the government would lose its right to exist.
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