IDF Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned on October 31 after admitting to IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir that the video of Israeli soldiers abusing a Palestinian terrorist at the Sde Teiman detention facility was leaked with her approval. In doing so, she not only became the first major general in the IDF’s history to be forced to resign due to a criminal investigation into her, but also implicated herself in the serious suspicions described yesterday: forgery, obstruction, and a false affidavit.
Unfortunately, this affair is a symptom of a much deeper problem, which I explored in my Shabbat column for Israel Hayom, an excerpt of which is below. Read the piece on Israel Hayom’s website here.
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Dori Klagsbald is a man of many accomplishments and merits—a top lawyer, a world expert on state commissions of inquiry. But he is certainly not a vacation consultant. The question therefore arises: how did the army, at the Israeli public’s expense, hire his services to defend IDF Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, if, as per the army’s own statement, she merely asked to go on vacation?
The Military Advocate General is soon to receive the dubious honor of being the first member of the IDF General Staff suspected of criminal activity—and not just any member, but the one responsible for upholding the law within the army, and not just any suspicions, but some of the most serious imaginable.
The official version speaks of an almost technical process: a routine polygraph test that uncovered the source of the leaked video showing abuse at the Sde Teiman base, the results of which were passed from the Shin Bet to the IDF Chief of Staff and then to investigators.
But it’s reasonable to assume that if David Zini had not been appointed as head of the Shin Bet, this likely would never have happened. Law enforcement authorities had not taken the leak seriously. Their selective enforcement has been glaring for years: the leak to German newspaper Bild was a major scandal, the leak of the political “Qatargate” investigation was a terrible scandal—but this one wasn’t. Only after the appointment of a new Shin Bet chief and a new chief of staff was the obvious finally done. Unlike his predecessor, Zini does not order spyware installed on the phones of senior prosecutors.
Now the matter lies before Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. In a properly functioning world, she should be furious about this betrayal of trust. After all, she did everything she could to prevent the investigation. She dragged her feet, shrugged her shoulders, and eventually submitted an affidavit to the High Court claiming that there was “no way” to find the person behind the leak. The document she filed was a copy-and-paste from previous cases explaining why it was “impossible” to find leakers in earlier scandals that upset the political right.
Now comes Baharav-Miara’s test: will she instruct the police to recruit a state witness from within the Military Advocate General’s office, as was done in other cases? If the suspicion is true—that Major General Tomer-Yerushalmi knew of and even ordered the leak—the proper course of action would be to offer the actual leaker a reduced sentence in exchange for catching the bigger fish. After all, simply handing the video to a journalist is something relatively easy to defend—it was investigation material that would have become public eventually, not a classified document.
The truly grave issue is that for years, those who call themselves “Israel’s gatekeepers” have spoken of the sanctity of the High Court. And now, according to the suspicions, they did not hesitate to present its judges with a false offering—a fraudulent affidavit. From someone who has spent years strengthening the power of the judicial system at the expense of elected officials, one would expect swift and aggressive action against anyone who desecrated that sanctum.
The Tomer-Yerushalmi affair is just a symptom of a much deeper problem that may finally be receiving overdue attention. The “gatekeeper” status has given its holders a self-granted license to act almost however they please. As I once wrote: if the Israel Electric Corporation has free electricity, the law enforcement system has free law. The Shin Bet can imprison a leaker who embarrassed its director, and the attorney general can take the law into her own hands.
Tomer-Yerushalmi should have been dismissed the day she spoke, in uniform, almost explicitly against the elected government’s judicial reform—or the day she allowed officers up to the rank of lieutenant colonel to join the anti-government Kaplan protests. Had her boundaries been set then, perhaps her office would not be crossing them so blatantly now.
