The Untouchables

In testimony yesterday before a special Knesset committee, established to investigate the conduct of the law enforcement establishment in prosecuting former Justice Minister Haim Ramon, the current minister, Daniel Friedmann, complained that the police and the Attorney General were doing everything in their power to protect police officials and prosecutors who violated Ramon’s due-process rights. Freidmann called for the establishment of an official Commission of Inquiry. Unlike a Knesset committee, an official Commission of Inquiry can issue subpoenas, force civil servants to testify, and prescribe sanctions for offenders. As things stand now, the people who violated Ramon’s rights are untouchable.

When Kadima came to power in 2006, Olmert made Haim Ramon Justice Minister. Ramon had a brief to reform the ministry, which means especially its most powerful bureaucracy, the State Prosecution. On the eve of the Second Lebanon War Ramon kissed a woman officer stationed in the Prime Minister’s office. He says she led him on; she charged him with sexual harassment. Ramon was convicted—but not of felonious conduct. He’s now a minister again.

The really curious part had to do with the way police, prosecutors and judges handled the Ramon case. A senior police officer with a checkered history, Miri Golan, apparently pressured the young woman into filing charges. Police obtained a warrant to tap Ramon’s cellphone, apparently on false pretexts. A judge issued the warrant without asking the most basic questions as to why the warrant was needed or justified. Then, the prosecution failed to reveal the content of the wiretaps or even the fact of their existence to Ramon’s lawyers, as required by law; doing so would have revealed that the state went fishing for additional incriminating evidence and found none. All these facts were confirmed by an independent inquiry performed by retired judge Vardimon Zeiler. Nothing has been done to those responsible for deliberately or carelessly violating Ramon’s rights.

There is nothing new with Israel’s law enforcement authorities bending the law when they’re out to get a politician they don’t like. When Binyamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister, Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, a Rabin appointee, filed trumped-up tax-evasion charges against Netanyahu’s Justice Minister, Yaakov Neeman. Later on a senior police officer, Moshe Mizrahi, obtained a warrant to wiretape conversations between Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, then (and since) under investigation for corruption. On the basis of the warrant Mizrahi recorded hours and hours of purely political conversations between the two. The low-ranking police officer who spilled on Mizrahi, Stanislav Yazhemski, fled to Canada because, he said, he feared Mizrahi’s vengeance. Eventually Mizrahi was force out, a singular and exceptional development.

In the Knesset yesterday Daniel Friedmann testified in bitter tones that all his efforts to force his ministry to discipline the officials who violated due process in their haste to railroad Ramon into jail have failed. Judge Zeiler seconded Friedmann’s call for a Commission of Inquiry, saying (according to Haaretz’ Hebrew edition), “Everyone involved with [the Ramon investigation] agrees terrible things were done.”

In reaction, Haaretz reports current Chief Police Inspector David Cohen as saying, “So every time an internal investigation reaches a conclusion someone doesn’t like, we’re going to appoint a special Commission of Inquiry?” Cohen referred to the anemic “internal investigation” of the affair by the complaisant Judge Nathan Brener, appointed by Mazuz, who concluded that nothing special needed to be done to any individual.

Inspector Cohen has a point. What’s needed is not a special Commission of Inquiry. The fact is that Israel’s police and prosecutors habitually play fast and loose with the due-process and civil rights of citizens, prominent or nameless. The judges are careless in exercising their authority to oversee, and hence check, violations of citizens’ rights. The entire law enforcement establishment acts like one big happy family, claiming to act beyond reproach, in practice devoid of oversight and out of control.

Nobody in a democracy should exercise authority without oversight. What’s really needed is set up a permanent civil rights authority, independent of the police, the courts and the Justice Ministry, with the statutory right to do everything, on a permanent basis, that a one-off Commission of Inquiry can do: Hold investigations, issue subpoenas, and prescribe sanctions for judges, cops and prosecutors who go off the reservation. The appropriate place to set up such an authority is within the Office of the State Comptroller, which is already responsible for investigating the way the rest of Israel’s government is administered and is not chummy with the cops, courts and prosecutors.