“There’s a sense that this time the public is focusing its rage on the judicial system”

1

The Israeli judicial system has been in a state of shock since masked military police stormed the Sde Teiman military base to arrest soldiers suspected of abusing detained Nukhba terrorists several weeks ago. Accustomed to running the show, the legal junta that brought the government to its knees during the judicial reform now finds itself the target of a sustained public fury no one in the judiciary predicted.

The nonstop demonstrations in front of the Military Advocate General’s home, as well the clashes between bereaved family members and High Court justices at a hearing on the case, reflect the shifting atmosphere. Since the incident, the judiciary resembles the Yemenite port of Hodeida after the Israeli airstrike.

“We didn’t expect a public backlash on this scale,” a friend, a longtime attorney, told me this week. “I’ve never seen anything like this. There’s a sense that this time the public is focusing its rage on the judicial system.”

And so when Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi — virtually unknown until her decision to arrest the soldiers at Sde Teiman — was summoned to appear before the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, public interest was high.

If it had been up to her, Tomer-Yerushalmi would have responded to the summons the same way Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara replied to her summons from Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chair Simcha Rothman. But it turns out that the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, a security body even more sensitive than the cabinet, is tougher than the Justice Committee. And the committee chair, statesmanlike Yuli Edelstein, who was embraced by the left for criticizing some elements of the judicial reform, is no Simcha Rothman.

The military advocate general went from accuser to accused, fielding tough questions — from both sides of the aisle — on the string of failures by her department: the brutal nature of the arrests; the leaked videos, which were seized on by anti-Semites around the world; and the security lapse that allowed the soldiers’ faces to be photographed during the pretrial detention hearings. Committee members said Tomer-Yerushalmi’s answers were laconic, seemingly drafted by cautious legal advisors.

Some members were reminded of the congressional hearings for the American university presidents who had turned a blind eye to anti-Semitic demonstrations on their campuses.

“The level of the responses was similar,” a right-wing MK told me, clearly hopeful that Tomer-Yerushalmi’s fate would follow that of former Columbia University president Minouche Shafik. “It turns out that the MAG is very tough when it comes to sending military police to arrest soldiers, but less so when she has to show up in person and answer tough questions.”

2

And that segues nicely into the attorney general’s decision last week to cancel day care subsidies for the families of 6,000 chareidi avreichim.

Whenever the Israeli justice system feels it’s losing the public’s trust, it never fails to pull the “equality of burden” card, perhaps the one issue on which Israeli public opinion aligns with the positions of the center left.

And the day care decision is just the start. Government legal advisors are laser-focused. Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon and Finance Ministry Legal Advisor Asi Messing are combing over every budgetary allocation, benefit, or subsidy in search of their next target. When Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich asked the deputy attorney general at a recent government meeting why a certain decision regarding the employment situation wasn’t considered in advance, Limon retorted that the ministry staff had been given a heads-up.

The bureaucrats laid the groundwork, the ministry’s legal advisor provided the legitimacy, but the minister in charge wasn’t told a thing.

3

The phrase “ein lanu al mi l’hisha’en” never rings truer than when applied to the current Israeli government. Not only is the prospect of restoring government funding for yeshivos and kollelim more distant than ever, but the worst is yet to come. Reuven Wolf and other benefactors from New York involved in the Keren Olam HaTorah fund report that a second round of funds is coming for yeshivos and kollelim whose funding has been decimated. But even this resource has its limits.

“The decision to cancel day care subsidies is worse than the suspension of yeshivah funding,” one rosh kollel told me this week. “The total funds lost [NIS 200 million] from the day care decision may be less than the yeshivah budgets. But when you have a large family whose expenses suddenly soar by thousands of shekels a month, there isn’t necessarily a way for them to find an additional source of income. It’s not like they’re going to become schnorrers and collect money from their relatives, who also have nothing.”

At the UTJ faction meeting last week, Degel HaTorah chair Moshe Gafni demanded that the government oppose the attorney general’s position. But anyone who’s been paying attention would have noticed that some Likud ministers didn’t seem too unhappy about the attorney general’s opinion. Justice Minister Yariv Levin and his allies are taking advantage of the day care crisis to try to hitch the chareidim to the stalled wagon of judicial reform.

At a government meeting, Levin repeatedly raised the need for changing the judicial selection process, as if that would help working chareidi mothers in the upcoming school year. The actual effect, of course, would be the opposite: the attorney general and the High Court cracking down even harder on the bruised chareidi public in the immediate future.

Instead, what was on the government’s agenda was the fateful question of who gets to appoint the civil service commissioner, with the attorney general arguing that the judicial element should have sway over the role, contrary to the government’s view that the position should be filled by the prime minister.

The ministers’ contrasting reactions to the two decisions shows that chareidi mothers are at the bottom of the government’s list of priorities. On the civil service commissioner issue, an official decision was passed rejecting the attorney general’s position, while on the day care issue, the ministers dispersed after the vaguest of statements by Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs about the need for an “examination.”

When the post of civil service commissioner (which has oversight over notoriously nepotistic civil service appointments) is weighed against the low-paying jobs of thousands of chareidi women, there’s no question which should win out. But these are the right-wing government’s priorities: the civil service issue merits a government decision, while the attorney general’s day care cut at most needs to be “examined.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1025)