Each day brings a scandalous new revelation as investigators probe deep into the affairs of the leader and his inner circle. The inquiries range across multiple fronts, tangling politics and business and involving both the top man’s closest aides and his immediate family. On a really big news day, the investigative authorities announce they’ve arranged a plea bargain with one of the key players, coaxing them to turn state’s witness against the man they once served so loyally.

Police question Benjamin Netanyahu over third corruption case Read more

In response, the leader resorts to social media to denounce his tormentors, claiming a witch-hunt by once-trusted institutions – the media and the courts, even the attorney general he himself appointed – and casting himself as the victim of a liberal establishment that hates him and his supporters. To his opponents’ despair, the ploy seems to work. The base stays with him. Despite everything, his poll numbers hold firm. But still, day after day, the legal net tightens.

If that fairly sums up the situation of Donald Trump, it also works for the man the US president greeted so warmly in the Oval Office this week: his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu. The two posed for pictures in matching dark suits and blue ties, flanked by their wives who also seemed to be colour-coordinated. Bibi and the Donald: they could almost be twins.

I’ve spent a week in Israel and the West Bank, speaking to politicians, diplomats and decades-long observers of Netanyahu, and the parallels are starting to look uncanny. While special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russia affair has expanded into a wider exploration of Trumpworld, so Israel’s prime minister faces a police inquiry into no fewer than four separate allegations of serious corruption, each one helpfully numbered.

Case 1000 centres on allegations of old-fashioned bribery: gifts of cigars, champagne and the like to Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, from a pair of billionaire businessmen who, the PM admits, he helped out, including on “tax issues”. Case 2000 alleges that Netanyahu sought to cook up a deal by which he would use the law to hurt one newspaper in order to boost the economic fortunes of its rival, in return for warm coverage from the latter.

Case 4000 is similar, an offer to a media tycoon to ensure state policy favourable to his telecoms company, in return for positive coverage of Netanyahu from a news website owned by the magnate. What could prove most serious is Case 3000, which accuses some of Netanyahu’s most trusted consiglieri of fraudulently profiting from Israel’s purchase of submarines from a German company. (The PM is not yet officially a suspect in the submarine affair, but as Aluf Benn, editor of the liberal daily Ha’aretz, told me, this threatens Netanyahu most because it touches on the military and national security – areas Israelis regard as “sacred”.)

For most politicians, a war on so many fronts would be overwhelming. And the Israeli press has indeed started to speak of the prime minister in a kind of conditional past tense, assessing the speeches he made this week in Washington as his last “before he embarks on the next phase of his career: as a defendant”. But such obituaries might just be premature.

Those poll numbers, which still show his Likud party on top, are the least of it. Even his most bitter critics admit that Netanyahu dominates the political landscape, dwarfing all his rivals both inside and outside his party. In the PM’s chair for nine years, and having held that post for three years in the 1990s, he is the country’s longest-serving leader since its founder, David Ben-Gurion. Israelis now struggle to picture anyone else in the role.

While outsiders see a terrible stasis, if not paralysis, with the occupation now in its 52nd year and the conflict with the Palestinians as far away from resolution as ever, most Israelis see stability, relative prosperity and, above all, quiet. Military funerals have become a rarity; people board Tel Aviv buses or sit in Jerusalem cafes without first calculating the odds of a suicide bombing. For this, they credit – even grudgingly and without affection – the man who offers himself as Mr Security.

He also benefits from the fact that so many of the scandals’ juiciest details relate not to him but his wife. Stories of her taste for luxury or her screaming fits as she demands more flattering treatment in the papers have turned her into a Marie-Antoinette-meets-Lady-Macbeth villain, a rod for lightning that would otherwise strike her husband.

But it’s his Trumpian qualities that are most striking. Trump was born into serious money, while Bibi was educated in a series of prestige institutions. Yet both pose as the plucky champion of the excluded, persecuted by the same permanent, snooty elite that has kept the little guy down for so long. “We are being attacked all the time, every minute and every hour,” Netanyahu complained on Thursday. “Listen to Israeli citizens who support us and who want justice.”

Both men rely on those most powerful fuels: fear and hate. While Trump regularly points an accusing finger at African Americans, whether athletes or war widows, Netanyahu knows how to play on Jewish Israeli fears of Palestinians, and not just those in the West Bank and Gaza but those who are fellow citizens living inside pre-1967 Israel. They have not forgotten how he won the 2015 election, by issuing a last-minute alert to his base that Arab voters were flocking to the polls “in droves”. In 2016, he hinted that a series of devastating forest fires in the north could be the handiwork of “elements with great hostility towards Israel”: code for Arabs.

Above all, what Trump and Bibi share is a toxic combination of selfishness and shamelessness. Trump thinks nothing of taking to Twitter to slam the FBI or the justice department, even if that means breaking Americans’ trust in vital institutions. All that matters is his own immediate self-interest. Netanyahu prefers posting videos on Facebook to tweeting, but the targets – and the effects – are the same.

It’s no good pointing out that Netanyahu helped dislodge his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, a decade ago by solemnly declaring that a prime minister under suspicion of corruption could not make vital decisions of state. Just as it’s futile reminding Trump of his “lock her up” claims against Hillary Clinton. Both are brazenly incapable of embarrassment. They are without shame.

Netanyahu’s shamelessness is corrupting Israel | Peter Beaumont Read more

The big difference is in their countries’ systems. Ultimately, the only real recourse against Trump is political, by bringing impeachment proceedings in Congress. But in Israel, as the attorney general clarified this week, the law – enforced by institutions doing their jobs, in the face of intense political pressure – demands that an indicted prime minister leave office, no matter how strong his political position. With that in mind, and given the state of the polls, Netanyahu’s most likely move is to call early elections. He might then gain a boost from the country’s 70th anniversary celebrations in May, and if he wins, argue that the public renewed his mandate despite the various charges against him – thereby allowing him to continue in office even while defending himself in court.

It would be an act of outrageous nerve, but you can see him pulling it off – with Trump himself watching in awed admiration.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist