Opinion | The Stakes of the Sde Teiman Affair

Israel’s former military advocate general (MAG), Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, is accused of serious crimes. But the crimes she exposed and the responses by right-wing public figures and politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are far worse.  

Tomer-Yerushalmi has admitted to leaking a classified video appearing to show Israeli soldiers torturing, sexually abusing and severely injuring a Palestinian security detainee at the Sde Teiman detention center in southern Israel. 

The abuse first came to public attention when the prisoner was hospitalized with broken ribs and a tear in the wall of his rectum. In July of 2024, military police, under the direction of the MAG, raided Sde Teiman, took documents and questioned reservists suspected of abusing detainees. The reservists violently blocked and harassed the officers. An angry mob broke into the Sde Teiman base, led by lawmakers in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, including some from his own Likud party. 

Five reservists were subsequently charged with aggravated assault against the detainee. But large parts of the public are convinced that these indictments were wrong and part of a witch hunt against IDF soldiers.

A society that claims to live according to liberal-democratic norms must reject acts of torture—even against vicious, repulsive prisoners.

Following the indictments, Netanyahu accused Tomer-Yerushalmi of “selective enforcement,” while far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir issued a public video telling her to “take your hands off” the soldiers. Social Equality Minister May Golan (Likud) declared that the protesters “came to support the soldiers because the people can’t accept that heroic fighters who have been risking their lives for nine months are being arrested.”

According to Haaretz, senior reserve officers and investigators said Tomer-Yerushalmi felt personally threatened by the scale of the incitement directed at her. Protesters branded her as a “betrayer of the people of Israel,” and charged that she had “defended” terrorists who were part of the October 7 attacks. The IDF provided her with a security detail.

“She was paralyzed by the incitement and social media discourse. She was simply afraid to open further investigations,” an unnamed source told Haaretz. Indeed, the indicted reserve soldiers are still free, and the date for their trial is unknown. No charges have been filed against the lawmakers who led the violent break-in to the prison. And a report by The Guardian claimed that some 88 percent of IDF investigations into alleged war crimes or abuse between October 2023 and June 2025 remain unresolved or were closed without finding fault. 

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In August 2025, Tomer-Yerushalmi leaked the surveillance video of the abuse to a TV journalist at Israeli Channel 12, who aired it on prime time. An investigation into the leak was begun. Ironically, Tomer-Yerushalmi’s unit was responsible for the investigation, and as she attempted to deflect the investigation from herself, she also allegedly committed acts of fraud and breach of trust, obstruction of justice, misuse of authority and provision of information by a public official.  

In late October, she took leave, then announced her resignation. In a letter to the military’s chief of staff, she took full responsibility for the leak, which, she wrote, was motivated by “an attempt to counter the false propaganda directed against the military law enforcement authorities.” 

She was initially held on remand, then put on home arrest. Several days later, she went missing for several hours and was unreachable by phone, prompting a massive search by police, rescue forces, the military and volunteers. Ultimately she was found alive, and police suspected she staged the drama in order to get rid of her phone, which may contain incriminating information. The phone was found by a volunteer who, like hundreds of others, was searching for her along the Tel Aviv beach.

Responses to this new stage of the saga were even more virulent and ferocious. To Netanyahu and his supporters, the leak by the MAG is just one more example of the “deep state,” made up of the judiciary, academia and other elite institutions and individuals. To maintain its control, they claim, this deep state does everything it can to undermine Netanyahu and his government. The MAG is merely a small part of the all-powerful leftist machine that seeks to impose “woke values” and protect its own privilege.

Netanyahu announced that the leak was the “greatest attack on Israel’s standing since the establishment of the state.” Defense Minister Israel Katz declared that the leak was a “blood libel against the soldiers of the IDF, exposing them to persecution and judicial proceedings throughout the world.” Transportation Minister Miri Regev also referred to the leak as a blood libel. Justice Minister Yariv Levin framed Tomer-Yerushalmi’s downfall as vindication of his efforts to curtail judicial power. “The system of lies that has been built here for years, trampling on the rights of entire communities and harming the security of the state and IDF soldiers, is crumbling,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

Television personality Yinon Magal, who has defined himself as a “tool to bring Netanyahu’s messages to the public,” tweeted that the investigation into the leak has revealed a “cartel” and the “way in which the entire judiciary system, including the Supreme Court, the attorney general, MAG, and others, have closed ranks at the expense of the IDF heroes, and the people of Israel—and all this, in war time.”

From his home in Miami, FL, the prime minister’s son, Yair, tweeted that the victim of the alleged abuse was a militant who participated in the October 7 attack and who was “bribed [by the MAG] in order to fabricate abuses against Israeli soldiers.” (In fact, there is no evidence that the victim of the alleged abuse was a member of those terrorists, as indicated by his release as part of the negotiations with Hamas.)

Writing in his party’s newspaper, Aryeh Deri, chairman of Shas, the ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi party, claimed that Tomer-Yerushalmi deserved her humiliation because she had been responsible for the arrests of Torah students who refused to serve in the army.

Speaking to the media in a taped video, the IDF addressed the scandal that gripped the country, saying that “those who have corrupted and failed to stand on the IDF’s norms” will be removed from the MAG office. 

They also issued a defense of the MAG office as a whole, saying that “we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater” and that the soldiers “carry out their duties to the highest standards.”

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In her whistleblowing, Tomer-Yerushalmi chose to break the law in order, in her view, to uphold the law, and for this she is likely to pay a serious price, including a possible prison sentence. But the attention and focus of the right wing—and, sadly, of the army itself, in its most recent announcement—has been on the messenger, not on the message.

The Sde Teiman affair is not only about one video or one officer. It should be self-evident that a society that claims to live according to liberal-democratic norms, as Israel does, must reject acts of torture, even against vicious, repulsive prisoners. But in order to maintain his populist, right-wing base, Netanyahu has promoted the view that IDF soldiers, like the government itself, can do no wrong and that those who enforce the law against them are enemies of the state.

Furthermore, the attack on Tomer-Yerushalmi reveals that Israel, like other majoritarian and illiberal democracies throughout the world, has entered a post-normative and post-truth era. The trauma of October 7, the two long years until the living hostages were returned and the fact that not all of the dead ones have been returned to date, along with the sense of fear and hopelessness that so many feel, have led many Israelis to “circle their wagons.” Fighting terrorism by any means is seen, by Israeli leaders, as justified to gain even a modicum of an illusionary sense of security. Emotion supersedes truth; true leaders would try to communicate with the public to prevent emotional, social and political traps that, perhaps understandable, are ultimately dangerous.

Instead, Netanyahu and his supporters are using the MAG leak as a proxy battle in their ongoing struggle against gatekeepers. As they attack these institutions for their own purposes, we can only hope that the rule of law survives.

Top image: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit (CC BY-SA 3.0)