Weekend Holyland Update – Judges, Stool Pigeons, and Casual Murder

As The Dude once said: This is a very complicated case… lotta ins, lotta outs. From an offer to buy a verdict for the PM’s wife, to lawmakers taking pride in mobster values, plus an incident that could make the West Bank explode - I’m here to help you make sense of it all.

If you follow politics closely and for long enough, you’ve experienced this dynamic before. When there’s a huge freakin’ scandal, the kind that reaches to very top, there’s a point where the high-level lackeys start to crack and spill the beans, and the details start coming wayyyyy too fast to follow them all, where even minds used to holding and processing shitloads of information get dizzy – especially if you got any kind of life or drama going on.

Such is the case with the myriad investigations against the Guru of Graft, the Sultan of Sordid Simony, The Liege Lord of Larceny, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Even friends and acquaintances who are still employed in the game are reporting difficulties in following all the threads. This is very complex case, man, lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what have yous. But fear not, intrepid text-traveler. I am here to serve as your guide through the maze, to the best of my modest ability.

Shall we take the first twist?

HOW NOT TO BUY A JUDGE (OR BE ONE)

Remember I told you (https://steemit.com/israel/@gangstayid/weekend-holyland-update-the-bibi-is-fucked-edition) about arrests in the “4000” case, in which Bibi gave telecom tycoon Shaul Alovitch legislation and regulation favorable to his business (scuttling a broadband infrastructure revolution in the process), in return for positive coverage in Alovitch’s major news website Walla? Yeah, it only got worse. Bezeq “owner” Alovitch (along with his wife and son), his CEO Stella Handler, and former Director General of the Communications Ministry have all been arrested and remanded to custody (UPDATE: Filber signed a State’s Witness agreement and is singing like the three tenors combined).

Also arrested were two consultants – one Eli Kamir and one Nir Hefetz. Hefetz is an odious henchman to tycoons who ran former major Israeli daily Ma’ariv into the ground in some insane attempt to bankrupt Haaretz and its sister-business paper, The Marker, regularly killed exposes on the rich and powerful as editor of Yediot’s weekend magazine, among other vile episodes, and has been an advisor to the PM for some years now.

At arraignment: The vile Nir Hefetz, despised by every single journalist I know who's crossed paths with him. Well, maybe save one, but that guy's a sellout, so QED. Photo: Ofer Vaknin, Haaretz

Kamir is “political and communications consultant” who somehow got a million dollar retainer from… Alovitch’s Bezeq.

But that retainer (nobody in the business seems to know quite how Kamir earned that fee) is not what landed him in the pokey. That would be too simple. No, the story is that Hefetz sent Kamir to a judge named Hilla Gerstel, then President of the District Courts who was presiding in Sarah Netanyahu’s “domestic corruption at the PM Residence” case. Let Sarah off the hook, the offer allegedly went, and you’ll be appointed Attorney General (which, beyond being the top job in law in Israel, is usually a fast-track to the Supreme Court).

Now there’s a lot to unpack here. Gerstel, a well-respected judge known for speaking her mind, did not go to the police with this offer, but rather reported It to Supreme Court Justice Esther Hayut, who is the current President of the Supreme Court (but was not yet then, although she was slated to be). Hayut, for her part, thought the report too vague to be actionable and didn’t tell anyone.

Nonetheless, a new casefile has been opened to investigate this episode, receiving the less-mnemonic code of 1270. Aw, look everyone! Case 1000 has a widdle brother.

Both judges, but especially Hayut, are facing growing criticism for this conduct, which may be used to muddy the charges against the real bad guys. Gerstel may have done her part by going to a much more senior judge. Hayut says Gerstel didn’t name names but “seemed appalled.” So what did Hayut do? Did she press Gerstel for the name? Did she instruct her to go to the police? No. She let the matter drop. Highly questionable judgment from the President of Supreme Court.

Esther Hayut, Chief Justice of Israel's Supreme Court. Cat got your tongue, Your Honor? Photo: Alex Kolomojski, YNET

In a normal country? She should go home. Of course, of course, following hearings and inquiries and due process and all, but I don’t see how she didn’t display disqualifying bad judgment here.

EMPIRICAL PRECEDENT

You might think it stretches the boundaries of believability that the PM would offer such a brazen deal, but he’s done precisely that before. In 1997 Netanyahu, who was elected on a platform of resistance to the Oslo Accords and most definitely refusal to expand them in any way, was forced (reality has a leftist bias, you know) to give the Palestinians control over the city of Hebron. The Mizrachi-religious Shas party showed its true nationalist colors by opposing this, so a deal was cooked up: Bibi would appoint a crooked “fixer” type attorney named Ronnie Bar-On as Attorney General (despite said shyster having zero academic or institutional credentials for the job), Bar-On would, by the powers thus vested in him, give Shas leader Ariyeh Deri (then facing corruption charges [for which he eventually did two years]) a sweetheart plea deal, and Shas would vote for the Hebron deal. Some sharp reporters noticed and the whole thing crashed down and Bar-On was forced to resign two days into the gig, amid fierce criticism and the specter of an expose about his gambling habits.

So the answer to “would a man like Netanyahu make a deal to appoint someone as AG just so he or she would favorably decide the outcome of an open case” is, empirically, a flat-out “Yes.”

Back to Case 4000 for a moment: Many people have said that with all due respect, favorable coverage in Walla! News hardly seems worth the hundreds of millions Netanyahu’s favorable policies delivered to Alovitch’s pocket.

I disagree, actually, but let’s run with that - well, how about data that can swing an election? This is not proved, but shyster-fixer-turned-reform-crusader Eldad Yaniv claims that in the week before the 2015 election, Bezeq delivered a million phone numbers of right-wing voters, segmented and categorized, to Filber, who passed them on to Bibi’s campaign. These were the recipients of the infamous, racist and inflammatory texts barrage (“The Arabs are streaming to the polls in droves. The left is bringing them on buses” was the most memorable of these) with which Bibi and the Likud reversed ALL the polls within 3 days and swung an impressive 30 seat win. Now Eldad Yaniv is not necessarily a trustworthy source, but this is interesting.

THE WORD IN THE HOUSE

So obviously, the opposition in Israel is calling for Netanyahu to have some shame, at long last, and either resign outright or declare incapacitation and either let Likud choose another leader who will then seek to receive the Knesset’s confidence, or just call elections.

Well, most of the opposition. Yair Lapid’s “Yesh Atid” party is keeping publicly vague and neutral, despite the fact that its leader is a witness for the prosecution in Case 2000. They’re neither left nor right, you see. They just bland and bougie. Lapid, incidentally, has been caught lying about meetings with tycoon (and Hollywood producer) Arnon Milchan, who is the $280K-cigar-and-champagne-supplying sugar-daddy from “Case 1000”. Maybe that’s why he’s not being loud, and not seizing on this golden opportunity for his pretense of “New Politics.” After all, polls are very flattering to him right now.

Netanyahu’s own party, Likud (30 Knesset Members), is in TOTAL circle the wagons mode, with government ministers blaming the fake news media (sound familiar?) and others getting their 15 minutes of fame by either speaking of the witnesses against Dear Leader in mafioso terms such as “squealer, nobody will sit with a squealer, I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry a State’s Witness…” (Coalition Chairman David Amsalem) or going full brainless and stating that “What’s being done to Bibi now is every bit as bad as the murder of Rabin.” (some utter moron named Mickey Zohar), or, like “Culture Minister” Miri Regev, making unfortunate forays into comedy, with a crack about how “We can now report that Bibi’s kindergarten teacher has been arrested. Knew he got an extra cookie from the TA and failed to report.” Guh-huh!

Unlike in South Africa's Parliament, all the Likudniks seem determined to die on the hill of cigars and champagne, and are apparently all convinced that the first to break ranks is politically dead.

It doesn't have to be this way. Check out ANC members celebrating the ouster of their own corrupt clown, Jacob Zuma

But in Israel, governing requires a coalition that together represents more than 60 of the 120 members of Knesset. No party has ever gotten it all alone, and Bibi’s Likud only has 30 of the 66 coalition members. So how are his partners taking his metastasizing corruption affairs, and the inevitable rub-off on them as his partners ?

I was gonna list them one by one, but you know what? No need. Not a single one of his five partners in the coalition, who range from 5-10 Knesset Members each, is coming out and saying that enough is enough; that nobody can function reasonably as PM (AND Foreign Minister, AND Health Minister, for fuck’s sake) while being embroiled in so much legal trouble, and that he should step aside.

WHY NOT?

The “why” boils down to 4 partners (the ultra-Orthodox Shas and Torah Jewry, the secular hard-right Israel Beiteinu and the secular center-right Kulanu) having nothing to gain from elections right now, and a fifth (the religious/nationalist Bayit Yehudi) with a more complex dynamic going on. The party, and leader Naftali Bennett personally (he used to work for Bibi, as did his #2, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked), would love nothing more than to pick up the seats they lost to Likud in the last days of the previous election campaign, and maybe then some. However, Bayit Yehudi has its own corruption issues, and owes massive amounts of money to suppliers and workers from the last campaign.

Naftali Bennett. Corruption? With this trustworthy face? Shocking!

Second, as a religious-nationalist party, their base is authoritarian. They won’t necessarily take kindly to taking down the leader, especially when they don’t see who can replace him as effectively, ensuring their continued pillaging of the country's resources for the settler welfare state and the enforcing of their agenda. They know Bennett isn’t going to go from AA-ball to the majors in one shot, and all the Israeli right remembers the trauma of 1992, when the hard-right brought down a Likud government and brought Rabin to power.

So Bennett can’t pull the trigger yet, although he's sneaking in barbs about how the PM should set an example and currently isn't. And to make sure that Bennett doesn’t pull the trigger, Bibi is delaying the passage of “Basic Law: The Nation” (Basic Laws are kinda sorta like a constitution). This is a vile Jewish-supremacist piece of legislation that would basically codify what anyone paying attention already knows – that Israel, which likes to call itself “Jewish and Democratic”, will always prefer the “Jewish” part in any real, perceived, or fabricated conflict between the two. Among other things, it demotes Arabic from its present status as an official language, and declares “Jewish law and heritage” (which is, when you start digging into it, incredibly bigoted and misogynistic compared to modern mores) as a source for jurisprudence.

Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home, or as I like to call them, the Jewish Brotherhood), really want this law passed, and will be able to market it to their voters as their own score because their #2, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, is one of the signatories to the bill. Once this law is passed, Bibi will become expendable for Bennett.

That’s where things stand right now, but with Filber having flipped, there’s more sure to come every single day.

MURDER IN JERICHO

Meanwhile, in Jericho, some IDF soldiers apparently got carried away during a raid in the city, and beat a detainee to death. Video footage shows him running at the soldiers with something in his hand, being knocked down and brought under control – so far so good – and then the soldiers began to wail on him with rifle butts and kicks, and, well, he’s dead now. At first the IDF tried to claim the guy tried to snatch a soldier's pistol, but there's no evidence of that in the footage, and the beating clearly takes place after he is down and under control. IDF also claims he was shot down, but apparently there's no such evidence on the body, which means a reportedly healthy 33 year-old was beaten to death. Soldiers beating up detainees is an everyday occurrence, but they usually know how to do it without killing.

This is bad timing for Israel, because the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody are uniting in a struggle demanding that all their cases be adjudicated by an independent international court, citing the inherent unfairness of Israeli military courts (in which several hundred are held in administrative detention, with no charges, evidence, or judicial recourse). A platoon of young occupation thugs beating a 33 year-old with no known health problems to death (and not getting any serious punishment for it, you watch and see), is not going to help Israel convince anyone that Israel is an acceptable arbiter of justice regarding the Palestinians.

I’m not sure what a boycott of any and all legal proceedings (the announced step by the united prisoners) is going to accomplish that hunger strikes haven’t before, but perhaps this latest murder by the occupation will be a big enough spark. Here, as well, I will humbly endeavor to keep you posted. Have a happy weekend, in which no foreign occupier beats you to death. I’d wish you freedom from kleptocratic leadership as well, but I’m trynna keep it real, yo.