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HomeGlobal PulseGlobal Pulse: The investigations on Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu are heating up

Global Pulse: The investigations on Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu are heating up

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Bribery, fraud and corruption

“It seemed that things could not get worse for Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, when on February 13th police recommended that he be indicted for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in two corruption investigations,” writes The Economist. But evidently, it can. It looks like a former aide could possibly provide damning evidence.

Shlomo Filber, a former chief of staff and campaign manager for Netanyahu, and Shaul Elovitch, a friend and telecom giant, are two important suspects who could seal the deal for the police. “The police suspect that Mr Netanyahu, who served as communications minister from 2014 to 2017, made regulatory decisions that favoured Bezeq and enriched Mr Elovitch in return for glowing news coverage by his popular website, Walla!. On February 21st Mr Filber agreed to serve as a witness for the state. He is expected to testify that his interventions on behalf of Bezeq, while serving as director-general of the communications ministry from 2015 to 2017, were made on orders from Mr Netanyahu.”

“Mr Netanyahu, who will be questioned under caution in the coming days, remains bullish. Last week he called the police recommendations “biased, extreme, full of holes, like Swiss cheese”.”

“Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he has no intention of resigning of his own volition and that he will “write [his] memoirs many years from now”. But his colleagues and coalition partners may eventually decide that it is not in Israel’s interests to be led by a man with so many clouds looming over him,” the Economist writes.

Asia, led by Japan

The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), or TPP 11, will be signed on March 8, and Japan has showed considerable leadership towards getting there. Still, the plan hinged on the involvement of the United States, and now Donald Trump has withdrawn. “At a time when Japan is doing more than ever to uphold the postwar international system, it is an extreme historical irony that Imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is finally being achieved,” writes Yoichi Funabashi in the Washington Post. 

“Since the war, Japan has for the most part conceived the ideal regional framework to be an Asia-Pacific fusion in partnership with the United States,” he writes. “The guiding principle was to keep the United States in Asia. However, the inauguration of TPP 11 marks the creation of a new, Japan-led pan-Asianism.”

“Taking independent pan-Asian leadership has been geopolitically tricky for postwar Japan,” Funabashi writes. However so far, neither the US nor China have opposed the island’s leadership.

“Nevertheless, Japan’s lurking fear is that pan-Asianism excluding the United States could push America to be further inward-looking. Deeper U.S. engagement in Asia is indispensable to balance China. TPP desperately needs the U.S. market to have strategic significance.”

“The sum total is the emergence of a new regional order without the United States. Japan is looking to fill the vacuum in partnership with Asian countries. The immediate aim is not to oppose or contain China but instead to fill the American void in economic and rulemaking terms,” he argues.

France is not “back”

Emmanual Macron has a new, detailed law on immigration.  “Given the long buildup to this announcement – with the government adopting a resolutely “firm” posture on immigration – the details outlined will come as little surprise. But they can teach us about the brutal limits of liberalism that Macron’s politics embody so immaculately,” writes Gabriel Bristow in The Guardian. 

“The new law plays on an old trope: it is framed in terms that entrench the division between “asylum seekers” and “economic migrants”. This division, so flippantly cited by the political class and yet so difficult to distinguish in law, will be reinforced by a tightening of the right to asylum. And yet, ultimately, the changes announced will be worse for all migrants.”

The French government aims to make asylum procedures faster. They also want to double the the amount of time spent at a detention centre, from 45 to 90 days. There is also a long list of ways to stop migrants from coming to France, and make it easier for them to be deported should they do so anyway.

“These measures have been widely criticised by policy experts as well as those working on the ground to help new arrivals. Migrants, supported by students, have occupied university buildings in Nantes, Grenoble, Lyon and Paris in defiance of the government’s hard line. Lawyers and administrative staff of the national asylum court are on strike for the eighth day running. But the criticism has not stopped there. The unity of Macron’s own party, En Marche, has been shaken, with several deputies expressing concerns in the lead-up to the announcements on 21 February. In the press, Macron is being presented as tougher on immigration than Sarkozy – which on paper, if not in rhetoric, is incontestable,” Bristow writes.

“Macron’s new immigration law places him in this tradition of exclusionary French liberalism. It represents a shrinking from the universal role that France has so long imagined for itself – and that Macron seemed so keen to rekindle (with a sprinkling of Silicon Valley jargon for good measure). His recent assertion – “France is back” – rings hollow. One cannot lead the world into a new liberal era while punishing migrants and refugees in one’s own backyard. In doing so, Macron has exposed the meagre confines of his humanism, and shown how liberalism, in drawing a sharp line at the border, falls short on the most basic questions of solidarity.”

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