The Sdeh Teiman affair may well prove to be the first strand of the government legal system unraveling

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hose who followed the pre-October 7 battle over judicial reform in Israel from afar likely assumed that the sole issue was the overweening High Court bent on determining every norm in Israeli society. But that is not the case. Judicial reform aimed to restructure the entire government legal system, in which a broad group of actors seeks to maintain the hold of the old Ashkenazi elites over the governance of the country.

Former High Court president Aharon Barak, for instance, imbued the attorney general with unprecedented powers, without any statutory warrant. He, or she (as is presently the case), is the final arbiter of every government decision. Her opinions with respect to government policies are not merely advisory, but binding upon the government, which must seek permission from the High Court to even appeal her edicts.

The attorney general is effectively the High Court’s emissary to control the government without actually getting its fingerprints on the decision. The position of the attorney general is a traditional stepping stone to a seat on the High Court, and the attorney general will always be mindful that the three High Court justices on the judicial selection committee, under the current system, exercise an effective veto over new colleagues.

At the same time, the attorney general is the head of the prosecutorial wing of the government. The State Attorney’s office is subservient to her. And as head of the prosecutorial wing, she has authority over police investigations as well.

An example of how this all works: More than a decade ago, the government proposed dividing the two roles of the attorney general — chief prosecutorial officer and the official with the authority to determine the legal validity of government decisions.

Then-attorney general and later High Court justice Meni Mazuz opposed the move. At a cabinet meeting where the proposal came up, Mazuz went through the ministers in favor and told them that they were ineligible to vote due to a conflict of interest, as they were each under police investigation — something that was hitherto unknown to many of them.

The police, it seems, have a file on everyone, to be trotted out as needed. The appointment of Yaakov Neeman as justice minister, for instance, posed a real threat to the entire governmental legal system. He was both a named partner in one of Israel’s largest law firms and a distinguished law professor.

At a meeting with several top prosecutors in the State Attorney’s office, then-attorney general Michael Ben-Ari assured them that the “new dog” would leave no scratches on the furniture. Soon thereafter, State Attorney Edna Arbel, later a High Court justice, dusted off an old file against Neeman, which had lain dormant for four years, knowing full well that the chances of securing a conviction were nil.

But she and Ben-Ari did not care about that. They knew that an indictment against Neeman would be enough to force him to resign, even though he was completely exonerated at his subsequent trial and the judge reprimanded the prosecution for bringing a groundless prosecution.

WHEN THE GOVERNMENT legal system consists of so many interwoven strands, there is always the possibility that the unraveling of one strand can cause the entire ball of string to unravel. Something of the kind is currently happening over the so-called Sdeh Teiman affair.

Sdeh Teiman is one of the prisons in which Palestinian terrorists are held. There are three levels of security at the jail, with only soldiers from Force 100 allowed into the area in which the prisoners are held. Their tasks, including searching captured terrorists, are conducted under conditions of extreme tension and danger. It is crucial that the prisoners, mostly hardened terrorists, feel intimidated by the Force 100 soldiers, whom they outnumber.

In the summer of 2024, army police arrested eight soldiers from Force 100 on suspicion of having used undue force on a Palestinian prisoner. The prisoner in question had been identified as particularly dangerous, and had called on his fellow prisoners to attack the Force 100 soldiers during his interrogation.

Subsequently, a seven-second clip of what was purported to be an interrogation and search of that security prisoner was shown on Israeli TV by Channel 12 legal analyst Guy Peleg. Peleg is a rabid critic of Prime Minister Netanyahu, and has called him “the greatest enemy of Israel’s security.”

In the video, the entire interrogation takes place behind a partition so it is impossible to see what was happening. But Guy Peleg claimed that there was a prisoner being violated by the Force 100 members. He had clearly been briefed by the IDF prosecutorial branch.

The video and the accompanying narration quickly went viral, and to date has been viewed approximately 100 million times around the world at incalculable damage to Israel’s international standing. It provided justification for the brutalization and violation of Israeli hostages then being held by Hamas.

As mentioned above, the clip actually showed nothing of the interrogation. Worse, the time stamps visible on the film were of two different days, meaning that the clip had been spliced together from two separate clips, and on one of those days the detainee in question had not yet been captured.

The million-dollar question thus became: Who had leaked the clip and why? Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s top legal officer, with the rank of general, announced that her office would conduct an investigation of the leak. But she eventually informed the High Court that her investigation had yielded no results.

The failure of that investigation was no accident. It turned out that the leaker had been none other than Tomer-Yerushalmi herself, acting in concert with several close subordinates. They had even coordinated the leak and subsequent cover-up on a WhatsApp group, so confident were they of never being caught.

What could have possessed an IDF general to have done something so inimical to Israel’s interests is difficult to understand — especially since the case against the Force 100 soldiers appears to be flimsy. Even before the release of the clip to Channel 12, the commander of the Sdeh Teiman base had determined that no undue force was used in the interrogation of the prisoner. And there is an 18-minute video of that interrogation. In the indictment filed in the case, nearly six months after the original arrest, there is no mention of the heinous violation described in the Channel 12 clip. Nor did the prisoner in question ever allege such a violation. (He is now safely back in Gaza, having been released in exchange for Israeli hostages as part of the ceasefire deal.)

The origin of the leak only came to light when Tomer-Yerushalmi sought to appoint one of her subordinates to a position as a military judge. That appointment required a polygraph test administered by the Shin Bet. When the candidate was asked whether she had ever leaked documents or classified material, she answered no, which sent the polygraph into wild gyrations. As a consequence, she confessed her role in the leak.

The newly appointed head of the Shin Bet, David Zinni, passed on the information to the Chief of Staff, Gen. Eyal Zamir, who in turn gave it to attorney general Gali Baharav-Miara. She instructed him to sit on the results of the Shin Bet investigation.

Zamir knew, however, that if he followed the attorney general’s instructions, Zinni himself would bring the information to the cabinet. Accordingly, he did so himself. Ironically, Baharav-Miara had fought tooth and nail against the appointment of David Zinni to replace her friend Ronen Bar as head of the Shin Bet, after the latter’s resignation due to the agency’s manifest failures leading up to October 7. Had Bar still been in office it is quite likely that Tomer-Yerushalmi’s betrayal might never have reached the public.

When it did, however, it set off a political firestorm. Attorney General Baharav-Miara tried to take over the investigation of the leak. But Justice Minister Yariv Levin (the primary author of the judicial reforms) informed her that she could not have anything to do with the investigation, as she herself would likely have to serve as a witness and had a severe conflict of interest.

Initially, the High Court tried to work out a compromise between the attorney general and the justice minister by suggesting that someone from the attorney general’s office also accompany the investigation. But it soon became clear that that was untenable.

In her affidavit to the High Court, Baharav-Miara expressed her outrage at those expressing their well-founded skepticism of Tomer-Yerushalmi’s original investigation of the leak, and supported the conclusion that it was impossible to ascertain the source of the leak. That was blatantly untrue, as seizing the phones of Tomer-Yerushalmi and her subordinates, or that of Guy Peleg for that matter, would have exposed the entire plot.

And, it turned out, there were good reasons for Baharav-Miara to want to protect Tomer-Yerushalmi. She owed her a debt of gratitude. Baharav-Miara’s son, an IDF officer, was caught on a security camera stealing the Kevlar bulletproof vest of another soldier, an extremely serious offense in the IDF. And yet he was never prosecuted. Tomer-Yerushalmi was the chief IDF prosecutor at the time.

As Gadi Taub, a Hebrew University professor, commented in his Tablet Magazine podcast on the affair, the film of the younger Baharav-Miara stealing the vest was far clearer than the clip shown on Channel 12 of Force 100 soldiers allegedly abusing a Palestinian prisoner.

Once Tomer-Yerushalmi was identified as the source of the leak, the chief of staff had no choice but to fire her. She also sent in her resignation letter the same day, a Friday. But even then, she was not arrested, as would surely have been the case with any figure identified with Netanyahu. Nor was her phone taken away to prevent her from tampering with incriminating evidence on it.

Just as a point of comparison, when Tzvika Klein, editor of the Jerusalem Post, was questioned as to whether he had received any compensation from the government of Qatar for an interview with Qatar’s prime minister, he was held apart from his family for days, and nearly a year later he has still not received his phone back. And when Ari Rosenfeld, a sergeant in military intelligence, leaked certain information to the prime minister’s office, which was later published in a German newspaper, Bild, he was held in jail, apart from his family, for 70 days.

On the Sunday following her resignation, Tomer-Yerushalmi was reported missing by her family and rumors circulated that she had committed suicide. In the end, however, she was found wandering on the Tel Aviv beach, but her phone had gone missing, with suspicion that she had thrown it into the ocean to prevent police from recovering it. A team of scuba divers was dispatched to find it, at great government expense, but in the end a person strolling on the beach found the phone in good working order.

Shortly thereafter, Tomer-Yerushalmi took a large number of sleeping pills in an apparent suicide attempt. She is, as I write, still in the hospital, and deemed not fit to be interrogated.

Besides Tomer-Yerushalmi herself, the big loser in this affair is the attorney general, Gali Beharav-Miara. In a rare move, the High Court sided with Justice Minister Yariv Levin that she cannot oversee the investigation of the Sdeh Teiman affair, and further rejected her alternative proposal, after she recused herself, that State Attorney Amit Aisman, whose office is subordinate to her, oversee the investigation.

At the same time, the High Court rejected Levin’s first proposed candidate to oversee the investigation, Asher Kula, a retired district court judge who currently heads the Judicial Complaints Authority. Last Thursday, he announced his second choice, Yosef Ben-Hamo, also a retired district court judge, with a background in criminal investigations. The Court had listed as one of the qualifications that the chosen appointee be a current state employee. But Levin informed the Court that he had been unable to find a sitting judge willing to take on the task. Nor is it clear why it should matter whether the candidate is currently a sitting judge. Many previous state investigations have been headed by retired judges.

On Friday, the day after Levin’s announced appointment, Court President Yitzchak Amit issued an injunction against the appointment taking effect, even though there was no petition before the Court that would have given him jurisdiction to do so.

The Court itself is playing a risky game here. It has always relied on the fact that in any confrontation between it and the government, the latter would always back down rather than ignore the Court on the basis that it had radically exceeded its authority. But should public perception grow that the Court is obstructing investigation of the SdehTeiman affair, the confidence of the government can only grow and hasten such a confrontation.

If that happens, the Sdeh Teiman affair may well prove to be the first strand of the government legal system unraveling.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1088. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)