Despite the ongoing Gaza war and the new cease-fire in Lebanon, and despite the International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued last month for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, the attention of Israelis has been largely focused elsewhere over the past few weeks.
Two domestic political incidents have particularly roiled the media and the public. One relates to an impending criminal case regarding leaks of classified information from the prime minister’s offices and the other to the escalation of Netanyahu’s and his government’s attacks on Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.
Taken together, they reveal the ends to which the current government is willing to go to remain in power.
In late November, Eli Feldstein, a spokesman for Netanyahu, was indicted for leaking information that, according to the indictment published in the press, “exposed Israeli intelligence capabilities to Hamas, which was likely to harm national security and the functioning of security agencies.” According to the indictment, last June, Feldstein convinced an IDF reservist (whose name remains under gag order) to provide him with highly classified documents in order to give support for an upcoming speech that Netanyahu was scheduled to deliver. According to the reservist’s lawyer, Feldstein claimed he was very close to the prime minister and had a high-level security clearance.
In fact, Feldstein was not formally employed in the prime minister’s office, because he had failed the required security clearance check. Yet he has frequently appeared in public alongside Netanyahu and provided answers to journalists in the prime minister’s name.
The reservist provided the documents to Feldstein in June, but Feldstein didn’t proffer the documents to Israeli journalists until September. When the military censor blocked publication in Israel, Feldstein bypassed the censor and gave the information to Bild, Germany’s most widely read daily paper. After the document was published in Bild, Feldstein urged local Israeli news outlets to pick up on the report. (This is permissible if the news is attributed to “foreign sources.”)
The timing of the leak is significant.
In September, Hamas murdered six hostages. Fierce demonstrations, tacitly supported by the military leadership, spread throughout the country, calling on Netanyahu to reach a deal with Hamas that would lead to release of the remaining hostages. But Netanyahu has consistently refused to agree to such a deal, at least in part because the far-right members of his coalition, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have threatened to bolt and topple the government if he does.
This is the modus operandi of this government. While never accepting any responsibility or even acknowledging the complaints made by the attorney general, they go on the attack, attempting to sow divisions within Israeli society.
The leaked documents, apparently written by lower-level Hamas operatives, claimed that it was Yahya Sinwar (then head of the Hamas politburo, who was subsequently assassinated by Israel) who did not want a hostage deal. Netanyahu seized on the Bild report, claiming that the protesters were “falling into Hamas’s trap.”
According to court records, Feldstein decided to leak classified information to foreign media outlets in order to sway Israeli public opinion against protests calling for a hostage release deal. The implication is that Feldstein was running a psychological warfare campaign aimed at the Israeli public, with the goal of reducing support for a hostage deal and therefore reducing pressure on the government to sign one.
But this did not keep Netanyahu from going on the offensive to protect Feldstein. On his X account, the prime minister declared that the attorney general and the legal establishment were “destroying the lives of young people through baseless accusations in order to damage the right-wing government.”
And in a video released last week, Netanyahu claimed that Feldstein “is an Israeli patriot, a passionate Zionist, a reservist captain. There is no chance he would intentionally do anything to jeopardize the security of the state.” He further claimed that the purpose of the indictment is to harm him and the citizens of Israel, adding, “We are fighting on seven fronts and battling on this one as well…This witch hunt will not deter me. Do not panic, and do not succumb to fear. We will overcome this.”
Turning to Feldstein’s and the unnamed reservist’s families, Netanyahu said, “It hurts that they are using your sons as a tool to harm me and an entire political camp.”
He said nothing to the families of the hostages.
In a highly unusual move, the attorney general’s office published a retort, criticizing what it referred to as “questions and allegations in the media and public discourse regarding the Feldstein case, as well as widespread misinformation propagated by those with vested interests.”
Undeterred, the government, earlier this week the government proposed a legislative proposal that is already being referred to as “the Feldstein Law.” According to this proposal, a person who provides the prime minister or minister of defense with top-secret information—even if this person does not have the security clearance to have the information—will not be considered to have committed an offense. Of course, the prime minister and minister of defense have clearance to read any and all information—but Feldstein does not. The proposed legislation would clear him of any wrongdoing.
And once again the attorney general published a statement, declaring that the law raised “a heavy suspicion that this legislation is personal and is intended as forbidden political intervention in criminal proceedings that pertain to the prime minister’s surroundings.”
Statements like these, and many others that stand in opposition to the government’s proposals and actions have led the coalition to mount an attack on the attorney general.
Netanyahu’s supporters are constantly threatening to fire her, and recently, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, a Netanyahu stalwart, declared that 13 ministers have already signed onto a document demanding the government move to do so. He declined, however, to provide the names of those ministers.
In Israel, the role of the attorney general is different than in the United States and most other democratic countries. The role is professional, not political; the justice minister must nominate a candidate, who must then be approved by an ad hoc committee led by a retired supreme court justice. Once appointed, the attorney general serves a six-year term, which, since a government only serves for four years (if it lasts, which it rarely does) guarantees their political independence and impartiality. Baharav-Miara was appointed during the previous government led by Naftali Bennet.
It is the attorney general’s role to advise the government when it is treading on problematic legal ground and to act as chief prosecutor. While in the past there have been occasional skirmishes between previous governments and attorneys general, they have never reached the levels of intimidation and threats of the current government.
But then, there has never been a government that is so overtly willing to cross legal norms and the law itself in order to stay alive. Or a government headed by a prime minister who is on trial for corruption—a trial that, as chief prosecutor, Baharav-Miara could delay indefinitely, as Netanyahu has repeatedly requested, or even cancel. Nor has there been a government with a justice minister, Yariv Levin, who is leading the overhaul of Israel’s legal and governmental system and is opposed to any intervention by legal authorities in government actions.
An attorney general such as Baharav-Miara is, indeed, a proverbial thorn in this government’s side. By reminding the government that they are breaking the law—when, for example, they illegally allocate government funds to religious institutions, or legislate exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men from serving in the army—or warning Netanyahu in an official letter that the national security minister was constantly breaking the law and could face a Supreme Court decision to remove him from office due to his lawlessness, or, most recently, by prosecuting Feldstein and the unnamed military reservist, the attorney general is infuriating these officials by trying to put a stop to some of the unprecedented, far-reaching policies that this government is trying to implement.
Even worse, from the point of view of the government, despite its threats, it will be difficult to fire her, because then the government would have to convince the same committee that appointed her to remove her. Furthermore, this would be a clear conflict of interest that would most likely be overturned by the Supreme Court, since Netanyahu would be firing the prosecutor who put him on trial.
But this does not prevent incitement against her. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, for example, has accused her of “paving the way for the assassination of the prime minister” because she has, he has claimed, failed to tackle violence and incitement from anti-government protesters. The message to some of Netayahu and the government’s base is clear—after all, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated following similar incitement. Indeed, Israel’s security authorities have assigned Baharav-Miara protective details because they have assessed the threats against her are at the highest level. No government official has publicly called for restraint of the rhetoric or expressed concern about the level of threat.
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Late November was a particularly difficult time in Israel, as ten soldiers were killed. Netanyahu did not make any comments about these losses, but he found the time to prepare both the X message and the 9-minute video mentioned above.
This is the modus operandi of this government. While never accepting any responsibility or even acknowledging the complaints made by the attorney general, they go on the attack, attempting to sow divisions within Israeli society.
Netanyahu will always present himself as a victim, intimating that he is the subject of a witch hunt that targets him and his family, perpetrated by a deep state, which Baharav-Miara and her ilk are part of, and that he and his supporters are committed to rooting out.
Furthermore, Netanyahu’s praise for Feldstein and his actions show that he will reward loyalty to him, even at the expense of loyalty to the rule of law, the country and the public.
Karhi, the communications minister, has often stated that the high court should be abolished. And he further asserted during a meeting of the Ministerial Committee on Legislation on Sunday that the government has the right to carry out “regime change” in Israel, and do away with long-established norms and procedures.”
And they don’t intend to let anyone get in their way.
Top image credit: Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Jerusalem / Tomer Jacobson / Oren Rozen (CC BY-SA 4.0)
This is an excellent articulate article on the current divide within Israel, between the efforts to support a democratic system based on checks and balances, and members of the government who would change the laws to enable them to remain in power. Thank you Eetta Prince-Gibson