weakened the Supreme Court. In a recent survey a majority of liberal Israelis said a victory in this election for the Netanyahu camp would be “intolerable”. The prime minister’s supporters are dismissive. “Israelis like to live in existential angst,” says Michael Eisenberg, a successful venture capitalist who advises the prime minister. “That doesn’t mean Israel isn’t facing serious challenges,” but given time they will largely solve themselves. Israel’s tech economy is resilient, he insists, and remains attractive enough to foreign investors to survive both the brain-drain and Israel’s international isolation. One way or another, the desire to be part of Israeli society will, he believes, ultimately draw young Haredim into the workforce “Sociological change takes time. The world wants what Israel is selling and the changing geopolitical order will be much more sympathetic to countries with clear ethnic identity, like Israel.” Israel’s economy has proved resilient. Its gdp grew by 2.9% in 2025 and growth is forecast to accelerate (see chart). It has made such recoveries before. Thanks to its knowledge- and tech-based economy, its growth rates were among the fastest to rebound after covid and the 2008 global recession.
But not all tech titans are convinced this will last. Eyal Waldman, founder of Mellanox, a chipmaker sold to Nvidia in 2019 for $7bn, argues “Mr Netanyahu’s government leading us into further isolation from the world may harm the growth of companies wanting to work and invest in Israel. There are already major international companies that don’t want to work or invest in Israel.” Mr Netanyahu seems unmoved by such concerns. Last year he said that Israel should become “Athens and super-Sparta”. By his telling and under his stewardship, Israel combines the democratic wisdom of Athens and the military might of Sparta. Victory has proved elusive but eventually Israel will triumph and regain the world’s respect. But the story of Athens is one of a democracy that ultimately failed. Sparta’s militaristic autarky, too, ended in collapse. The prime minister’s opponents seem to understand that a radical change of course is imperative to draw Israel back from the brink. But so far they have shied away from telling Israeli voters some hard truths: that its enemies cannot simply be destroyed, that Israel cannot keep itself safe with “security zones” and, most crucially, that a just settlement with the Palestinians is essential for Israel’s future. Uniting Israel’s deeply divided society on such matters will be hard enough, but Israelis must have that reckoning. Even if Mr Netanyahu’s foes oust him on October 27th, their work will be only starting. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//briefing/2026/07/16/israels-future-hangs-in-the-balance
Donald Trump’s transformation of the Department of Justice will be hard to undo Democrats challenge a big Hollywood tie-up Cities are rethinking what happens after dark America’s other elections problem Lindsey Graham tried to save the wrong countries from Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s transformation of the Department of Justice will be hard to undo Political prosecutions are just part of a more radical reinvention July 16th 2026 Anyone who has ever worked as a lawyer for Donald Trump makes a bet. There is the possibility that you, too, will run afoul of the law—eight of the president’s lawyers have themselves been indicted. Alternatively, your work might pay dividends. Such was Todd Blanche’s calculus three years ago when his white-shoe firm gave him a choice: represent Mr Trump, then a candidate and a criminal defendant, or remain a partner. Mr Blanche chose Mr Trump. Now the president has selected him to be America’s top cop. On July 15th the Senate began hearings to consider Mr Blanche’s nomination to lead the Department of Justice (DoJ). Whether lawmakers confirm him as attorney-general will test their willingness to endorse Mr
Trump’s legal agenda, but even a rebuke would be only symbolic. The president will still get his way at the DoJ; Mr Blanche can stay in the job on an acting basis for months and be replaced by someone similar after. With or without Mr Blanche, the president will continue to lead a transformation of dramatic scale. With warrants and subpoenas, the DoJ is pursuing Mr Trump’s critics and his hobby-horses, from political adversaries to election fraud to leaks in the press. The number of lawyers has dwindled by 20%; former prosecutors point to an incompatibility between the president’s agenda and the fair application of law. The DoJ is retreating from certain types of criminal enforcement. And, increasingly, judges are telling government lawyers that they cannot be taken at their word. The DoJ’s duties, at least as historically defined, include enforcing the law and defending the government in court. Ever since Richard Nixon urged his attorney-general to interfere with an investigation, politicians of both parties have generally agreed that the DoJ should operate at some distance from the presidency. Mr Trump has bucked that consensus, claiming that Democrats weaponised the law against him. Joe Biden’s DoJ indicted him twice, elected Democratic district-attorneys indicted him twice more and Letitia James, New York’s attorney-general, sued him in civil court. Pam Bondi, Mr Trump’s first attorney-general, was fired in April for being insufficiently aggressive. Mr Blanche told the Senate this week that he is not the president’s “yes man”. But shortly after assuming his current post, Mr Blanche was touting a second indictment against James Comey, a former FBI director and antagonist of the president. Mr Comey had posted a photo of seashells on a beach arranged like “86 47”. To “86” someone means to get rid of them; Mr Trump is the 47th president. The DoJ contends that Mr Comey was threatening to kill Mr Trump. This prosecution is almost certain to fail, just like the president’s cases against Ms James; Jerome Powell, the former chair of the Federal Reserve; and six Democratic lawmakers. Last month a court tossed subpoenas targeting Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, and other Democratic officials in that state. The judge wrote that the subpoenas were “not issued to investigate, but to harass, coerce and retaliate” for the officials’ refusal to aid the president’s immigration crackdown.
Mr Trump complements prosecutions of political foes with lenient treatment of his friends, through pardons and dropped charges. Last year political appointees at the DoJ ordered prosecutors to abandon a corruption case against Eric Adams, then New York’s mayor. Unlike Mr Walz, he had agreed to co-operate on immigration. A judge in New York wants to know whether a quid pro quo inspired the DoJ to drop fraud charges against Gautam Adani, an Indian billionaire who has promised to invest $10bn in America. Mr Trump had sought to reward allies most explicitly through a $1.8bn fund for supposed victims of government lawfare. Even Republican senators balked at that; in June Mr Blanche said he had given up the idea. But it loomed over his confirmation hearing, with John Cornyn, a Republican senator, observing that his answers “don’t lead inevitably to the conclusion that it’s dead”. The DoJ is vast; last year it charged 81,000 people. Politicised probes mark a radical departure from past norms, but they are not enough to upend that work. Yet broader change is underway, too, with the department itself depleted and redirected, at remarkable speed. Mass attrition means that some of the most experienced lawyers have left, often for better pay in the private sector. A former prosecutor in the Virginia office that first indicted Mr Comey recounts how, after charges were issued, nearly everyone in his unit started looking for new work. “These people have job options.” Now the DoJ is struggling to fill its ranks, lowering hiring standards to take applicants straight from law school and offering some recruits $25,000 signing bonuses. Units specialising in cryptocurrency fraud and corruption by public officials have been gutted. (As it happens, Mr Trump made more than $1.4bn from cryptocurrency last year.) The group focused on counterintelligence and enforcing export controls has warned Congress of “unprecedented personnel constraints”, with a 40% drop in prosecutors from a year and a half ago. Up to a third of the counterterrorism section has left, says a former prosecutor in that unit. The FBI, which sits within the DoJ, has lost about 300 special agents who worked on national security.
The DoJ’s national-security division has expertise that most prosecutors lack, in handling classified information and charging complex statutes. They sift through dozens of FBI referrals and decide which to pursue. “What feels real versus which ones are idle chatter? When is the right time to disrupt a plot? Do we go now? Prosecutors learn that only by working these cases over many years,” says one who left last year. Fewer resources mean less enforcement in some domains. White-collar defence lawyers remark how work has slowed. Last year the number of financial-fraud indictments out of DoJ headquarters and the US attorney’s office in Manhattan fell by 30% from the ten-year average. Indictments are a lagging indicator of enforcement activity. Subpoenas of financial firms, which precede them, are “not happening, basically,” says a white-collar lawyer in New York, who expects even fewer indictments to come. “Nobody’s investigating those things.” Cases targeting political graft have largely dried up. Mr Trump is notably lax about that, having granted clemency to at least 20 politicians convicted of self-dealing over his two terms. Instead the DoJ has made a big show around the president’s bugbears: health-care and benefits fraud; anything connected to cartels; transgender care; diversity, equity and inclusion; and election fraud. Recently the FBI