Israel’s leftwing party Meretz has been entangled in a storm over the past four months—which coincided with the elections—with four complaints of sexual harassment against party directorate member Nimrod Barnea. Party chairwoman Tamar Zandberg appointed an investigator—female—to examine the issue and even demanded that Barnea suspend himself from his post until the end of the investigation.
Barnea, for his part, petitioned the party’s court, claiming that Zandberg’s decision to appoint a special female (or any other) investigator to look at the complaints against him was not within the chairwoman’s purview.
The five members of the court panel ruled unanimously: “We accept the complainant’s charge, and determine that the actions of the respondent in his case, in particular the appointment of an investigator, were made without the authority to do so and are void.”
The party’s court added: “We do not discuss, and cannot discuss, any complaint against the complainant, since to date such complaints have not been submitted to the Court by any complainant (despite the special procedure established for such complaints), and we were not asked to do so by the complainant.”
The Meretz court also ruled: “We hold by a majority opinion that the actions of the respondent (Zandberg), which were made knowingly without the authority to do so, as well as her public calls and public statements against the complainant – even assuming that they stemmed from ideological motives – constitute an inappropriate behavior (on Zandberg’s part).”
Meretz Chairwoman Tamar Zandberg has been conducting a fierce battle against the phenomenon of sexual harassment inside and outside her party, and has often called on politicians and public figures to suspend themselves from their posts following complaints of sexual harassment against them.
The fact that her own party’s court has issued such a harsh ruling against her in one of her key policy issues, has obviously infuriated her. Zandberg called the court’s ruling a “delusional decision, which takes our struggle back 20 years.”
According to Zandberg, this ruling constitutes a divorce from the values of Meretz, which she committed herself to continue to defend in the future, regardless of what the court might have to say.
Incidentally, Zandberg, who had been elected to lead the party to recapture its once glorious past as a 12-member Knesset faction (which collaborated in cauldroning the 1994 Oslo Accords), led Meretz instead from 5 to 4 seats, barely ahead of the threshold percentage.