On Sunday, PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet is expected to vote on the establishment of a commission of inquiry headed by former district judge Moshe Drori, with former national public defender Inbal Rubinstein, and Shalom Ben Hanan, who was head of a division in the Shin Bet. The commission will examine the troubling gap between police statements regarding the unauthorized use of the NSO spyware Pegasus (they told the court under oath that there were zero such cases), and later findings (there were 1,086 such cases). In light of this discrepancy, it’s easy to understand why the police brass don’t want such an inquiry.
Senior police officials have warned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in recent days that if the Pegasus Commission of Inquiry is approved on Sunday, it would lead to a wave of policemen’s resignations, Reshet Bet Radio reported. According to police sources, the resignations will come from the police SigInt division (Signals Intelligence, or intelligence-gathering using spyware) – between 60 and 70 officers. It would be an astute response, to retire with one’s pension intact, rather than be fired for massive lawbreaking and face jail time without a pension.
Last week we reported that AG Gali Baharav-Miara sent a letter to Minister Levin, suggesting he does not have the authority to grant the committee power to examine pending criminal cases. She stated: “Granting the authority to the committee to investigate these procedures undermines the fundamental principles of the independence of the law enforcement system.”
Levin responded with the kind of gusto we wish he had shown over the past eight months: “The attempt of an entity and its head to dictate the boundaries of the inquiry which has to do with an affair in which it is involved and whose conduct would be examined as part of the inquiry, is inconceivable. […] Under these circumstances, the conflict of interests of the AG is crying to high heaven.”
MK Moshe Saada (Likud), the former deputy head of the Police Internal Investigations Department, was a guest on Channel 14’s The Patriots Saturday night, and said, “Anyone who harmed the privacy of Israeli citizens will be punished. The more important message in my opinion is that we’re all equal before the law, no one has immunity. Everyone will be investigated.”
Saada named names, including AG Baharav-Miara, former AG Avichai Mandelblit, former State Attorney Shai Nitzan, former police commissioner Roni Alsheikh, who reportedly brought Pegasus with him from his previous job at the Shin Bet, and many more, most notably the nice folks from the police SigInt division.
Netanyahu is expected not to vote at the cabinet meeting on the establishment of the commission of inquiry on the spyware, because of a possible conflict of interests.
Last week, Justice Minister Yariv Levin met with Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee chairman MK Yuli Edelstein, who recently expressed his reluctance to go along with his party’s decision without thorough deliberation. And so, it stands to reason that Levin, who used to be Edelstein’s close political ally, spent two hours making sure the influential MK was in the know and would support the commission of inquiry, as well as the Knesset’s continued judicial reform during the winter session.
MK Saada promised Saturday night that as soon as the winter session begins, the coalition would push through a bill empowering a restructured committee to appoint judges, without the dubious representation of the members of the bar association.
