What’s happened: The cabinet convened yesterday to discuss and hold a vote of no confidence in the attorney general. This is the first step towards removing her from office.
- The cabinet meeting was chaired by Justice Minister Levin, as the prime minister recused himself, due to his ongoing trial and a conflict of interests.
- Making the case against Baharav-Miara, Levin said, “The attorney general has almost systematically refused to appear before the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. She ignores ministers’ requests and doesn’t respond to me. She blatantly ignores letters from me, the justice minister, to say nothing of what happens with other ministers. The attorney general operates in complete contradiction to her role, in a way that cannot be described as anything other than political while citing legal impediments in a long list of things. The attorney general is using her technical power to prevent government legislation and has become a sort of veto.”
- Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara did not attend the meeting but sent a letter outlining her position, “This proposal is not trying to further the cause of confidence, but rather loyalty to the political leadership. It is not about governance, but rather unchecked governmental power as part of a wider programme to weaken the judiciary and to deter all the professional levels. The government wants to be above the law and to act without checks and balances.”
- The ministers voted unanimously in favour of the no-confidence motion.
- In parallel, thousands demonstrated outside, protesting the government’s decisions to fire both the head of the Shin Bet Ronen Bar, and now Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. Though unelected, both positions are considered gatekeepers of democratic norms.
- Among the speakers at the demonstration outside the government meeting included retired Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia. She told the crowd, “We are in the midst of a deep rift that threatens to bring down the entire democratic institution. For the first time, the unwritten agreement that all governments have respected is being violated. Breaking the independence of central institutions and breaking down oversight institutions will cause the face of this country to go from one extreme to the other. Israel will no longer be a free, democratic country but rather a different type of regime that we cannot recognise.”
Context: The process of firing the head of the Shin Bet and the attorney general will both be discussed by special committees. The decisions could then be appealed in the Supreme Court.
- Both committees will focus on procedural issues and the apparent conflicts of interests.
- On procedure, the role of director of the Shin Bet will be reviewed by a special advisory committee for senior appointments.
- The office of attorney general is covered by a different special advisory committee comprising a mix of legal scholars, civil servants, and politicians. However two appointments have expired and have not been replaced. One is required to be a former attorney general, the other required to be a former Minister of Justice. Every single living former attorney general, including several appointed by Netanyahu, strongly opposes the firing of Baharav-Miara.
- On the other side, recent former ministers of justice are known to support her firing. As well as being former justice ministers, both Speaker of the Knesset Amir Ohana and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar are part of the current administration.
- In Saar’s case, he voted with the cabinet last night, despite being the minister that recommended Baharav-Miara’s appointment in the Bennet led government.
- To further complicate matters, the person occupying the law professor seat on the committee is Tali Einhorn, a very conservative scholar known to be quite enthusiastic about firing Baharav-Miara, but she too might have to step aside for an obvious conflict of interest, her son, Srulik Einhorn, (an adviser to the prime minister) is one of the three leading suspects in the unfolding “Qatargate” scandal, as well as in the illegal leaks of classified material to the German Bild newspaper last year. He is currently in Serbia, and has refrained from returning to Israel for months in order to avoid police questioning.
- In any event, the advisory committee’s recommendation are non-binding. However, given all the procedural difficulties, the Supreme Court might very rule that ignoring both or either violates the now famous “reasonableness clause.” It almost certainly wouldn’t accept a process where the committees have not even been convened.
- The larger conflict of interest surrounds the prime minister, as the attorney general is prosecuting his corruption trial. He absented himself from the cabinet discussion on her dismissal, but it’s not clear that the Court will be impressed that this is enough.
- In the case of the Shin Bet director, he cannot absent himself. The Shin Bet is an agency inside the Prime Minister’s Office, and he is the one who requested the director’s dismissal. Here is a different conflict of interest, as it was the Shin Bet that launched an investigation into Qatari influence in the Prime Minister’s Bureau. Ronen Bar himself has all but outright accused Netanyahu of seeking to fire him and replace him with a more pliant director in order to quash this investigation, and this is a version of events that much of the Israeli media has broadly accepted. If the Court accepts it too, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which it approves the government’s decision to fire Bar.
- Netanyahu and his closest backers see the events in the exact opposite way: they argue that the entire investigation of Qatari influence was concocted as a way to block Bar’s dismissal. This was the central accusation Netanyahu made in a video he posted Saturday night with “bombshell revelations” about the timing of the investigation.
- When so much of the investigation classified and under a gag order, it’s not easy to piece together the precise sequence. However, several Israel media reports have suggested that the dates don’t add up in a way that is compatible with Netanyahu’s argument. The Prime Minister’s Bureau was asked to respond to the first Qatargate report in the media one day before it first even suggested dismissing Bar.
Looking ahead: The Court will consider Bar’s case on April 8th.
- The government has given several ambiguous indications that it will ignore a Court ruling it does not like (only one minister, Moshe Arbel of Shas, has explicitly ruled this out). Such a situation would plunge the country into a constitutional crisis and, most likely, a crippling general strike.