by Fontpagemag.com
Award-winning columnist and author exposes the Deep State's war against Netanyahu.
Award-winning columnist and author Caroline Glick recently spoke at the Freedom Center's annual Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, Florida (Nov 15-17, 2019). Don't miss the video and transcript below:
Transcript:
Thank you, Ushai. Thank you, everybody. So, yes, we have this issue in Israel. We don't call it the deep state. My colleague, Urel Segal, coined a better term for Israel, which is it's the deep shtetel, and I want to introduce a subject to you.
A lot of people are saying, "Carolyn, can you tell us about what's happening in Israeli politics? What's going to happen with the government?" Donald Trump was speaking before a group of Orthodox Jews in New York this week, and he said, "I don't know. These Israelis, they have election after election but nobody ever gets elected. What's going on?" And, you have this real question in the United States. What in the hell is going on out there? Really, what is happening? And, I think it's really important for us to focus in on this, because a lot of the things – I write a lot about Iran. I write a lot about the Palestinians. I write a lot about the external threats to Israel, Turkey, and many others, and yet it's really been hard for me to concentrate on those things, because so long as we don't get our own house in order, it's very difficult as a practical matter to push any strategic shift in any of these things in a way that's going to secure our long-term future in national security. And, so I think to understand it, you have to recognize that.
What Dan was talking about today and what so many Americans on the ride and in the center and really just anybody who cares about the rule of law and separation of powers is talking about in the United States today is about this attempted coup against President Trump and what's happening and what's going to happen and is anybody ever going to pay a price for this. Is he going to be booted out of office? Is he going to be impeached, and if he's impeached, what's going to happen in the Senate and so on and so forth, but at the same time and parallel to what's happening in the United States, we've been having a very serious parallel situation happening in the Israel with our bureaucracy that increasingly over the past generation has viewed itself as a more legitimate repository of the people's will and sort of a Rousseauian, proto-totalitarian way in thinking that professionals are better than politicians and that there's a professional class that is pure and objective and great and is white as the driven snow as opposed to all the dirty piles who are corrupt and corrosive to the very soul of the nature. And, Americans really are moving in that direction as well.
I remember there was something really telling with Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing in the Senate where she was asked who she really is inspired by in the legal world, and she said Israel's Chief Justice Aharon Barack is really for me an inspiration. He's my champion in my whole philosophy of the judiciary. And, the American Jewish community was caviling over this. Wow, she's just a Zionist. Wow, what a proud Jew. This is great, and Israelis were looking at this, who were aware of what she said in the testaments and go "Oh, my God, what's going to happen to America, because our own Barack is a judicial imperialist."
In the 1990s while our politicians in the Knesset were sleeping and had no idea what was happening, he completing swept away the balance of powers in Israel and something that's referred to as Israel judicial revolution that he enacted with the support of a very small group of Knesset members and most of whom didn't even know what they were voting for. Our own Barack, he passed a basic law called human dignity and freedom, and it seemed like it's sort of a nothing law, not at all controversial. It passed with something like 30 members of Knesset out of 120 voting for it, 21 voting against it, so you didn't even have a majority of members of Knesset voting at all, because nobody thought it was that important, but he used this basic law as a means to revolutionize governments and governance and the governability of Israel and start, what he called, his constitutional revolution. And, I'm not going to get into the weeds too much, but I'm just going to say he started instituting new norms inside of the judiciary. The most important one was that he abolished all limitations on standing before the court.
In the United States, if you want to submit a petition to the Supreme Court, you have to have standing. You can't be somebody on the sidelines who has no direct interest in what's happening in a case and say, "Well, we think it's just wrong and therefore we don't think the government should be allowed to do it, and we're going to ask the nine justices of the Supreme Court to adjudicate this matter that doesn't impact us directly," but in Israel, you can. Anybody who has the money to submit a petition to the Supreme Court can do so, and if the justices feel like adjudicating the issue, they will, and by eliminating all standing standards and turning it into an arbitrary standard of the justices of Israel's Supreme Court will adjudicate anything they feel like adjudicating.
They took away effective ability to govern from the government. Why? Because you had a lot of radical NGOs that are mainly funded by foreign powers, in Europe particularly, foreign donors in the United States on the American left who have been funding this judicial revolution. So, they're petitioning the judiciary to adjudicate just about every single decision that the government makes. And, these are dually promulgated government decisions based upon dually promulgated Knesset laws, but the justices sitting in judgment get to decide whether the law is constitutional – Israel, by the way, has no constitution – or whether it's unconstitutional and whether it's reasonable or not reasonable, and they make up their standards as they go along.
A lot of these NGOs are very clear about what they want to do, and they say that their purpose in putting out these petitions is to gum up the works of Israel's government to make it impossible for the government to enact policies, and I'll just give you an example. They've gotten involved with military decision making. So, for instance, the IDF has a policy of not endangering soldiers when they're trying to arrest terrorists. So, they were using something that they referred to as the neighbor regulation, so that you would have a neighbor of a terrorist knock on the door where he was suspected of hiding so that he wouldn't get shot in opening up the door so that the IDF forces could go in and not get killed. These radical left organizations petitioned the court, say, "We think that's just wrong." And, the court said, "You know what? We think so too." And so, regulation that the IDF was using effectively and wasn't endangering the neighbors, because neighbors aren't being targeted by the terrorists, and it's protecting the lives of our soldiers is thrown away, because our radical justices decided that they didn't think it was a good idea.
And, this was done because, again, innocently the government, when it was set up in 1949 and on, they had this idea of how judges should be chosen, and so they put together a judicial selections committee that was comprised of members of the Knesset, of government ministers, or representatives of the bar association, and of sitting Supreme Court justices. And, what ended up happening was the Supreme Court over time was able to ensure that the justices sitting there went together with the bar association, and the politicians represented the government and the opposition inside of the Knesset. They had a permanent majority, so they were actually able to select their own members. And so, what we had over time as a result was an end of diversity on the court, not only on Supreme Court but on our lower courts.
Now, this in turn impacted the state prosecution, because among many of the things that the Supreme Court did was they made a rule in one of their judgments in a case called Pencassi where they said that if a sitting cabinet member or a government minister is indicted of a crime, he's forced to resign. So, that gave the power to determine who could sit in the government to the prosecution. If they chose to exploit this for ill, they could. They could get anybody fired simply by indicting them, and what happened as a result was that they went ahead and they began misusing this power so that we have had in a space of 10 years, we had three justice ministers indicted or threatened with indictment. Three? Let's see, we had Yacovney Aman. We had Socra Inigmy, Ruby Rifflin. Oh, and Hymrin, four. Four justice ministers were indicted during their period in power or one that was pending approval of his appointment as justice minister to prevent them from coming in or prevent them from reforming the justice system. So, we've had this situation with the justice minister. We've had it with a slew of other ministers as well in our government that have been prosecuted, and very rarely are they convicted. And, if they're convicted, they're convicted of crimes that could just as easily not have been prosecuted in the first place, because they were minor, but they were ways to get them out of politics, and certainly ways to get them out of the justice ministry.
So we've had this, and another thing that they did was that they took over the appointments process of senior government officials, like for instance the chief of staff of the IDF so that they used – there was a politic scandal over the appointment in 1997 of the attorney general, the first Natanyel of government. It was made up. It worked out that the scandal was incorrect. There was nothing to it. Their claim that Natanyel traded horses with a politician who was under police investigation that they would bring in an Attorney General that wouldn't pursue charges against him, and in exchange this other politician was going to vote in favor of an agreement to withdraw partially from Hevrone in the Hevrone deal from 1997. It worked out that this wasn't true, but this was put forward in the media, and they used the scandal over what was called the Barone Hevrone scandal to force the government to accept an appointments committee that got to decide who the attorney general and state prosecutor were going to be.
So, since 1997, the government is only allowed to choose among candidates that are preapproved for it to choose among for the attorney general and for the state prosecutor. So, the government doesn't actually have the ability to decide who's going to be in charge of the prosecution. The people who do have the responsibility are the judges, because I forgot to say that the chairman of the appointments committee is a retired Supreme Court justice so that the justices put themselves in charges of the appointments. That by doing that, they put themselves in charge of the attorney general and of the state prosecution. They have taken away the government's ability to adopt and implement policies through their open standing -- and they've made the army increasingly gun shy by entertaining petitions from these radical so‑called human rights organizations that keep alleging that our soldiers are war criminals.
So, we have a situation where over time our government has become increasingly powerless as our prosecution and our legal fraternity in general have become increasingly powerful. And, by the way, the stick of the imperial legal fraternity in Israel has not given anybody mercy. Bar association heads who are willing to engage with politicians to conduct reforms, for instance of the judicial selection process and the judicial selection committed, then find themselves under scurrilous and often criminally instigated criminal probes, and they are left with no recourse, because they're facing prosecutors who are entirely corrupt and judges who are entirely corrupt in terms of their total fealty to a system that brought them into power, which itself is corrupt and self-perpetuating.
So, this is a situation that has been brewing in Israel really since the early 1990s, again since our own Barack enacted to a sleepy Knesset full of people who had no idea what was going on, this judicial revolution that gave the Supreme Court of Israel unchecked powers over our politicians. So, why does that have anything to do with a political paralysis in Israel? Because they've also taken over the political calendar, and about 3 years ago I think it was that they started opening political probes or criminal probes against Prime Minister Netanyahu. And, these probes have been aggressively pursued and systematically leaked information from police investigations to the media. The media, by the way, is absolutely on board with this. All of the legal correspondence in the television are basically – they are completely dependent on this kind of machine of the legal fraternity to get all of their scoops and to get promoted. They, too, are self-perpetuating.
So, we started getting this sort of just sea of prejudicial leaks against the prime minister almost daily in the news, starting at the very outset of the investigations. And, right now we have three probes. They're called very sort of ominously Case 1000, Case 2000. There was a Case 3000 that everybody said that this was going to put Bibi away for life, but it worked out that he had nothing to do with anything, and so then they talk about Case 3000 but kind of whisper about it now, because they're a little bit embarrassed about it, but then there's Case 4000, which is a real zinger, and that's going to put him in the big house forever and ever and ever.
The problem is -- well, Case 1000 alleges that he received gifts to the tune of a million shekels, which is something like $330,000.00 from various wealthy friends of his in the form of cigars and bottles of champagne for his wife, Sara. So, it works out that it's less than that. It might be something more like $100,000.00, and it's over 15 years or whatever, but this is absurd. And, so they're saying that he should go to jail, because he accepted cigars from two or three different friends. So that's Case 1000, and it's piffle. I mean, it's sort of – that's like nothing.
And then, we have Case 2000 and Case 4000, which are much more problematic. They're problematic not only for the way that they have been sewn together but also because of their implications for the freedom of the press in Israel and for Israeli democracy in general, and I'll get to that in a second, but can somebody bring me a glass of water? Would that be possible? Anyway, Case 2000 alleges that ahead of the 2015 elections Netanyahu had a series of conversations with the publisher of what used to be, until my paper took over, the largest circulation paper in Israel called Yedioth Ahronoth. Yedioth Ahronoth is a very, very left-wing newspaper. It's a tabloid, and it's owner, Arnon Mozes, is probably the most powerful person in Israeli media, and he's very far to the left, and he's also very frightening to a lot of people, particularly to politicians, because people – I think politicians fear nothing more than they fear the media. And, they care about nothing more than they care about the media says about them. I had no idea how powerful the media was until this past year, but politicians are terrified of the media and totally dependent on them for their very existence. So, Noni Moses has been fighting a war to destroy Netanyahu for over 20 years, so Netanyahu was first elected to Prime Minister in his first term from '96 to '99, and, and from then on, his mission in life apparently has been to destroy Netanyahu and he's done a lot in order to get his way. So in 2015, Netanyahu started taping these conversations that he was having with Noni Moses and in these conversations, Noni Moses was asking him, in exchange for positive coverage, to convince Sheldon Adelson, the owner of Israel Hayom, the newspaper that I work for, to cut back on circulation of their Friday paper. Friday is like our Sunday paper and that if Noni would do that, I mean if Adelson would do that then Noni would give Netanyahu more positive coverage ahead of the 2015 election.
So Bibi was taping these conversations because he felt that he was being extorted by Noni Moses. These conversations were being taped by his then chief of staff, Ari Harow. The police opened up a corruption probe against Ari on something totally unrelated regarding alleged influence peddling from his position as chief of staff and the head of the World Likud Organization, and they did something unbelievable in the police. They said we'll give you leniency or whatever for this probe if you turn state witness against Netanyahu on something totally unrelated. This is not done. It's like saying we're going to get you off for armed robbery if you go after somebody totally unrelated to the probe against you for, I don't know, hanging puppies, and there's no connection between the two, but that's what they said because Ari had these conversation between Bibi and Noni Moses on his cell phone, and the police had taken the cell phone to pursue this influence peddling criminal probe against Ari. By the way, the police were opening up criminal probes against almost all of Netanyahu's senior aides, and basically denuding him of his entire staff one by one, which was something else which was completely unbelievable.
So the interesting thing about Case 2000 is that at the same time, you had politicians on the left who were drafting a new legislation called the Israel Hayom Law. Israel Hayom is a free paper, and they were drafting a law to prohibit Israel Hayom from being distributed for free and trying to force Adelson to begin charging for his newspaper, which is completely illegal in Israel because you have the right to run your business any way you want to. It's a free economy, and so you can't do that, but they were trying to regulate because they wanted to force it out of business. Forty-three members of Knesset voted for it. All of them received positive coverage from Yedioth Ahronoth, the biggest beneficiary of this law. The law itself was drafted by Yedioth Ahronoth's lawyers and it was submitted to the Knesset by a Labor politician named Akan Kabal who was never seriously investigated even though the coverage of Kabal went from negative to positive as soon as he became involved in drafting the law, and finally, then Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni passed a law into the Knesset against the advice of the Attorney General who said that it was unconstitutional and she too was the recipient of fantastic coverage by Yedioth Ahronoth. None of these people were ever investigated for receiving a bribe from Yedioth Ahronoth.
And the other thing that's interesting about it, of course, is that until they started investigating Netanyahu, nobody ever heard of the concept that positive media coverage could be considered a bribe because in no country on the face of the planet is positive coverage considered a bribe because if positive coverage is considered a bribe, then journalism as a point of fact is a criminal enterprise, and I don't care what you think about media this or media that, the very concept that a journalist writing positively about a politician has accepted a bribe or this is part of the quid pro quo, means that there can be no press freedom in your society because everybody has to worry that they're going to be pulled before police investigators based upon what he or she writes. So it's very frightening, but it's also here what we see in Case 2000 is selective enforcement of the most profound type against Netanyahu, and also, we have to bear in mind that Netanyahu never received positive coverage at all.
Finally, the most important case that's being pushed against him is called Case 4000. Case 4000 is very convoluted on the face, but it's also very simple. Netanyahu for a brief period, served as well as Minister of Communications. Well, not that brief, I think it was over a year from around 2015 to around 2016 in his last term of office, and in the period preceding his takeover of the Ministry of Communications, three was a big regulation reform of the telecommunication sector in Israel, and Israel's largest telephone company, Bezek, was given permission after a long legal process to merge with one of Israel's television providers, a satellite television provider in Israel. It's a company called Yes, and the reason it's important is because like you have in America with Comcast and all these others that you have bundling, so that you get Internet, television, cellular telephone, and landline from one provider and you can get different services based upon these bundles of services that you can get from one provider.
So the idea of merging Bezek and Yes was that it would improve consumer service. It was also that one of the criteria for enabling this was that Bezek was then going to be forced to provide infrastructure for I think it was cable. I can't remember, to the periphery of Israel. So you have much faster service, or it was high speed Internet. You have much faster Internet say in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem than you might have in a place like Dimona in the Negev, okay. So this was all being done by regulators and the telecommunications sector. Bezek is owned by a then billionaire named Shel Alowich and he and his wife, Eris, happen to be good friends with the Netanyahus. Now, they also own a web site called Walla. Walla is a big web site. It's mainly shopping, but it also has a news port, a Walla News, which is like almost every web site and almost every news site and newspaper and news channel or television station, it is left wing. So Alowich and his wife are not, and they're good friends with the Netanyahus, and Bibi was demanding good coverage from Walla, from his friend, saying why aren't you giving me good coverage and, you know, Sara was saying why are you printing ugly pictures of me, and stuff like that, you know, like politicians say during almost every day, you know, how dare you, why'd you give him credit for my law when I wrote it, and you're mean and I hate you, and everything else.
So what the police are saying, and in the meantime, this again was before the 2015 elections, was that there was an improvement in Walla's coverage of the Netanyahus that was happening at the same time as the merger between Bezek owned by Alowich, was with Yes, the television provider was being approved by the regulators who were operating under Netanyahu, who was then Communications Minister, and therefore, the quid pro quo here was that Alowich received regulatory treatment that earned him a billion shekels in profits, which by the way is totally false, but who cares, in exchange for having 2 ½ pro-Netanyahu articles and a nice picture of Sara Netanyahu on Walla News Service, and therefore, this the proof that Netanyahu received a bribe in the form of positive coverage for a regulatory favor that he did. It doesn't matter that Netanyahu was just a rubber stamp for a regulatory process that had preceded his entry into office by 3 years that had been prolonged, that had gone through every regulatory body before he had anything to do with it.
There was no proof whatsoever that he had anything to do with it or that the decision that was made by the regulators was wrong, that is, that it somehow or another abused the public trust. To the contrary, it gave better service to Israeli consumers, particularly in the peripheral areas of Israel, but this is the case. Now the thing about it again is that what they're saying here is nothing, I didn't receive a penny, money, not in campaign contributions, not in cold hard cash, not in a Swiss bank account, nowhere. He got no money. He got no fancy furniture. He didn't get a pet horse. He got nothing, okay, but he did get, according to the prosecutors, he got better coverage in Walla. Of course, the coverage, 90 percent of the articles written about Netanyahu were horrible, but 10 percent weren't. So he is a felon. He committed a felony. Now the problem here, I mean there are 150 million problems here, but one of the problems here that's much larger than Netanyahu is that if you can claim, again, that positive coverage of a politician by a news source is bribery, then all journalism is criminal.
All relations between journalists and politicians are immediately suspect and can lead to anybody involved, editors, journalists, media owners to find themselves under criminal investigation, and all of this is happening, amazingly, with the great support of the Israeli media. Now why is it happening with the great support of the Israeli media? Well, for two reasons. The first is that our media, as I said, is terrible. Now I went into the media, I went into journalism 19 years ago because I figured somebody had to say something that wasn't a lie, you know, and anyway, I didn't have anything better to do, so I just figured I might as well start writing, but that was really why I went into the journalism world, and I was very innocent about the whole thing, but it is really quite spectacular to see all of our networks, such as they are in Israel, standing beside the state prosecutors and the police investigators as they criminalize our profession.
And why is this happening? Again, it's happening for two reasons, and by the way, this is all like a joint enterprise of the media and the state prosecution/police. Why? Because for the past 3 years, they have, again, on a daily basis almost, put out selective prejudicial leaks from confidential police interrogations of suspects, and by the way, they've hauled in Netanyahu's closest advisors as criminal suspects to coerce them into becoming state's witnesses against the Premier, and it worked in both Case 4000 and 2000 with his closest aides, by threatening to destroy their lives, humiliate them. One of them they had evidence that he was carrying out an affair and they threatened, and now, of course, I don't know what's going to happen to his marriage because it's all over the press, but that they were going to release it and his wife and children were going to leave him, and they were going to destroy him economically, and lo and behold, and he was incarcerated for 15 nights and days in a flea-ridden jail cell, this was the senior advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel, until they broke him. And they did something very similar, and I've heard even worse, to the then Director General of Administrative Communications, again, one of Netanyahu's longest serving, closest advisors. So they've done all of this and we're watching.
Now I said why don't we have a government, because they've controlled the electoral calendar with these probes. So for instance, the first election of this year was held on April 9, 40 days before the election. In an unprecedented move in Israeli history, the Attorney General decided to publish the, what would you call it, the preparatory findings. So what happens is, is the police completed their investigation. Everybody knew that they wanted to indict him for bribery and breach of trust, and all these other things, but bribery is the big on in Case 4000, but it wasn't official. That was what the police wanted, and the police themselves are a completely separate kettle of fish, but have also been deeply corrupt over the past 20 years and politicized. So they had already leaked, and then published officially that they thought that Bibi has to go into the big house. Then it was up to the Attorney General. Now what happens with the Attorney General in criminal prosecutions of this kind or investigations of this kind is that they do something, which in and of itself is sort of a perversion of justice, where they give a hearing, a pre‑indictment hearing to the senior official that's being investigated, so that the Attorney General acts as a quasi-judicial body so that he receives all of the evidence and holds a sort of trial where the accused is allowed not to face his accusers, god forbid, but to give his side after he supposedly received most of the, or all of the prosecution's material and pre‑appeal hearing discovery after a 3-year investigation.
So Netanyahu hadn't gotten his hearing yet. Forty days before the election on April 9, Mandelblit, our Attorney General decided to release his preliminary recommendations pending hearing, which was indict, indict, indict, and this is in the middle of an election. So he's saying in the middle of an election, I'm going to indict the Prime Minister, and that doesn't have any impact on the election? Of course it does. So that was his first decision to act entirely politically. There's no legal precedent for any of this behavior. It's totally extra-legal that the Attorney General decided to become the most important politician in the election and of course, his name wasn't on any ballot, and he wasn't chosen by the government. He was chosen by the Supreme Court and forced upon the government. So that was stunning and it did have an impact.
The Likud did well, and then by the way, the Supreme Court also is in charge of the elections, because a Supreme Court justice is in charge of the Elections Commission. So he gets to decide what you're allowed to say, what you're not allowed to say on air in the last 30 days before the election. He is allowed to say what's illegal propaganda and what isn't, and he's the one who decides whether you have to have a recount of suspected ballots. So there was massive voter fraud documented in Arab villages that gave two extra mandates to Arab political parties at the expense of the right. There was undercounting in other areas where it looked as though the right received more votes so that if this hadn't happened, you would've had profoundly different electoral results on April 9, but they decided not to recount in certain ballots, and yes, to recount in other ballots, in a way that manifestly assisted the left and harmed the right in a very serious way, and I'm not going to get into all of the weeds here, but at the end, Netanyahu wasn't able to form a government and he decided to go to new election. Call new elections, Knesset disbanded, go to new elections, and here, you know, we've got this sort of hung Knesset. So the new latest update is that Benny Gantz, the head of the Blue and White Party, intends to form a minority coalition with these pro-Hamas Arab parties, and supporting them from the outside, so giving Hamas effective veto power over government policy, and all this why, to eject Netanyahu from office because Blue and White says well, we don't mind having a unity government with Likud, but only after Netanyahu resigned. We're going to decide for voters who gets to be the head of Likud, and a word about Blue and White.
Blue and White is a party that's run by three former chiefs of staff and one media star, okay. Now what's interesting about these chiefs of staff? I started saying you can't really think about Iran. Well, let's think about Iran for a second. In 2012, 2010 we had a Chief of Staff named Gabi Ashkenazi, who was No. 4 in Blue and White. Gabi Ashkenazi together with then Mossad head, Meir Dagan refused an order that Netanyahu gave them to prepare the military to attack Iran's nuclear installation. This all came out before the 2012 Presidential elections in November, and Meir Dagan told Leon Panetta about the order to get the Obama administration to prevent it from happening, which is treason. So they refused this order to prepare the military and the Mossad for an imminent attack against Iran.
Then after Ashkenazi who came in, Benny Gantz, who is No. 1 on the Blue and White list. Now Benny Gantz was not the first choice of the government as Chief of Staff. The person who was chosen was Yoav Galant who was the Deputy Chief of staff of the IBF at the time, and all of a sudden, an NGO nobody had ever heard of called something like the Green Lobby, petitions the Supreme Court, said Galant is unfit to serve as the Chief of Staff because he expropriated land in his moshav to build a driveway for his house, and therefore, he's a crook and he shouldn't be approved by the appointments committee. And the Attorney General at the time, this man named Yehuda Weinstein, told the government that he wouldn't defend the government's decision to appoint Galant to be the Chief of Staff before the court, which effectively ended his ability to be appointed. This was after his appointment was already confirmed by the government. So they weren't allowed to even choose the Chief of Staff of the Army, and instead, who comes in, Benny Gantz.
So we see here that we have a situation. Blue and White’s party platform is no interference with prerogatives of the judiciary, no interference, no judicial reform, no legal reform, no governmental interference with decision making of the general staff of the Army. So what they're saying is that their platform is to denude the Israeli politicians of all power to govern, and to give all of the power of elected politicians to our unelected bureaucrats, to our deep shtetel. And now, the news reports are saying they want to unseat Netanyahu so badly that they're willing to form a minority government with outside support from Hamas supporting Arab parties.
So this is where we're standing right now in Israel, and in the meantime, and, you know, this has all been published, but, you know, you're talking about elites, who like in the United States, have literally no shame and no fear, I mean to the point where before Shabbat, or I landed here on Friday, Shai Nitzan, who is the prosecutor, who is simply out of control, he wrote a letter to a group of alumni of the state prosecution, including one sitting Supreme Court justice and three district court judges including two on the Tel Aviv District Court that would be sitting in judgment of Netanyahu if he gets indicted, telling them these are the talking points of the prosecution against its critics. Please go out and get interviewed and use them, which is, you know, by the way, that would be a bribe, right, according to his own definition of what a bribe is, that he's asking for positive coverage. So he's soliciting a bribe that he should be under his own bizarre, anti-democratic totalitarian definition of bribery. He should now be subjected to a criminal probe for sending out that email, but whatever the case.
And so now where does it all stand? Shai Nitzan finishes his term sometime this month or at the beginning of December, so they're saying that Mandelblit has decided that he is going to make a decision about whether or not to indict Netanyahu in accordance with Shai Nitzan's tenure. So he's going to make it in the next week or 2, so that Shai Nitzan gets to leave a clean house. He gets to put away the Prime Minister and go off under a halo of glory that he was the one who killed the king, and the thing of it is, these cases are obscene. They themselves are illegal. They themselves are criminal, and yet our judiciary has become so radicalized, and our state prosecution is so contemptuous of the public that has no power over them whatsoever, that they couldn't care less. They couldn't care less. So really, the only thing that we have going for us is the public themselves, and so you have a lot of people who are getting up and they're protesting, and they're staging these protests outside of Avichai Mandelblit, the Attorney General's home to try to put pressure on him not to destroy Israeli democracy and not to unseat a Prime Minister who has committed no crime under any normal rulebook, and to not destroy Israeli democracy.
Is this going to help? I don't know, but we have one of the organizers of these protests you've all got, is here as well from Israel, and a few weeks ago, he asked me to speak at one of the protests and to say, you know, there are about 5,00 people there and the media reported it as something like, I don't know, like a thousand, and so Israel, there were a few hundred people there, 10,000 people there, yeah, you know, maybe 800 people, but we don't see anybody, and everybody's screaming in the background. They just don't want to hear, and the idea is to try to depress belief that we can actually make a difference. And by the way, I'll just tell you one more thing, which is that, you know, in April, Netanyahu's platform, and this was after in 2015, and then 2012, he made people like myself incredibly frustrated because he refused to run on a platform at all. His platform was applying Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and massive legal reform in Israel. And so they knew what was coming down the pike, and now, we're facing a situation where in order to avert the public will from being followed, we may find ourselves being governed by Hamas because the people who are pushing this are motivated now by an ideology that exists, that is entirely based on hatred of the right. It's not based on peace. They know there's no peace. It's not based on the idea that if we run away, you know, that the Arabs will leave us alone. They know that's not true. It's just based on a raw and insatiable desire to have power, power for power's sake, and if that doesn't work well enough, three of the heads of Blue and White have criminal probes hanging over their head so that if they ever step out of line, they know that they'll find themselves under investigation faster than they can say I hate Bibi, okay.
So all of this is happening now, and so when you think about your deep state here in the United States, understand that apparently, what's happening here is part of a much larger phenomenon in the western world. We obviously see it with Brexit and with the European Commission, and all of the bureaucrats in Europe that are making directives against the peoples of Europe, denying them their self-determination and their liberty. So we're seeing this as part of a very big phenomenon, and when you talk about populism, it's not really so much populism. I don't know what you would call it except that we just want to be able to govern ourselves. I mean I don't think it's a populist thing to say that laws should have meaning and Lady Justice is supposed to be blind, and you cannot have selective enforcement of laws, and you cannot have appointed bureaucrats dictating what our government can and cannot do based upon their own ideological proclivities.
So we're going to continue. I, and thankfully, there are a lot of people now as Ushai said, who are fighting the good fight in Israeli journalism. My paper has been working very hard to make sure that the truth and the fullness of the story is known to the public in a way that it would never have been known before, and so that's really what's happening with us, and I think that I've overplayed by card and everybody wants to hear my really good friend, David Goldman, talking about China. So I'm going to just leave it at that and one last thing. We have one clip of me saying one sentence in English at this one protest that I spoke at, and so you can all see me, the rabble-rouser, as I walk off the stage, if we can go to the videotape?
Thank you very much.
Fontpagemag.comTranscript:
Thank you, Ushai. Thank you, everybody. So, yes, we have this issue in Israel. We don't call it the deep state. My colleague, Urel Segal, coined a better term for Israel, which is it's the deep shtetel, and I want to introduce a subject to you.
A lot of people are saying, "Carolyn, can you tell us about what's happening in Israeli politics? What's going to happen with the government?" Donald Trump was speaking before a group of Orthodox Jews in New York this week, and he said, "I don't know. These Israelis, they have election after election but nobody ever gets elected. What's going on?" And, you have this real question in the United States. What in the hell is going on out there? Really, what is happening? And, I think it's really important for us to focus in on this, because a lot of the things – I write a lot about Iran. I write a lot about the Palestinians. I write a lot about the external threats to Israel, Turkey, and many others, and yet it's really been hard for me to concentrate on those things, because so long as we don't get our own house in order, it's very difficult as a practical matter to push any strategic shift in any of these things in a way that's going to secure our long-term future in national security. And, so I think to understand it, you have to recognize that.
What Dan was talking about today and what so many Americans on the ride and in the center and really just anybody who cares about the rule of law and separation of powers is talking about in the United States today is about this attempted coup against President Trump and what's happening and what's going to happen and is anybody ever going to pay a price for this. Is he going to be booted out of office? Is he going to be impeached, and if he's impeached, what's going to happen in the Senate and so on and so forth, but at the same time and parallel to what's happening in the United States, we've been having a very serious parallel situation happening in the Israel with our bureaucracy that increasingly over the past generation has viewed itself as a more legitimate repository of the people's will and sort of a Rousseauian, proto-totalitarian way in thinking that professionals are better than politicians and that there's a professional class that is pure and objective and great and is white as the driven snow as opposed to all the dirty piles who are corrupt and corrosive to the very soul of the nature. And, Americans really are moving in that direction as well.
I remember there was something really telling with Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing in the Senate where she was asked who she really is inspired by in the legal world, and she said Israel's Chief Justice Aharon Barack is really for me an inspiration. He's my champion in my whole philosophy of the judiciary. And, the American Jewish community was caviling over this. Wow, she's just a Zionist. Wow, what a proud Jew. This is great, and Israelis were looking at this, who were aware of what she said in the testaments and go "Oh, my God, what's going to happen to America, because our own Barack is a judicial imperialist."
In the 1990s while our politicians in the Knesset were sleeping and had no idea what was happening, he completing swept away the balance of powers in Israel and something that's referred to as Israel judicial revolution that he enacted with the support of a very small group of Knesset members and most of whom didn't even know what they were voting for. Our own Barack, he passed a basic law called human dignity and freedom, and it seemed like it's sort of a nothing law, not at all controversial. It passed with something like 30 members of Knesset out of 120 voting for it, 21 voting against it, so you didn't even have a majority of members of Knesset voting at all, because nobody thought it was that important, but he used this basic law as a means to revolutionize governments and governance and the governability of Israel and start, what he called, his constitutional revolution. And, I'm not going to get into the weeds too much, but I'm just going to say he started instituting new norms inside of the judiciary. The most important one was that he abolished all limitations on standing before the court.
In the United States, if you want to submit a petition to the Supreme Court, you have to have standing. You can't be somebody on the sidelines who has no direct interest in what's happening in a case and say, "Well, we think it's just wrong and therefore we don't think the government should be allowed to do it, and we're going to ask the nine justices of the Supreme Court to adjudicate this matter that doesn't impact us directly," but in Israel, you can. Anybody who has the money to submit a petition to the Supreme Court can do so, and if the justices feel like adjudicating the issue, they will, and by eliminating all standing standards and turning it into an arbitrary standard of the justices of Israel's Supreme Court will adjudicate anything they feel like adjudicating.
They took away effective ability to govern from the government. Why? Because you had a lot of radical NGOs that are mainly funded by foreign powers, in Europe particularly, foreign donors in the United States on the American left who have been funding this judicial revolution. So, they're petitioning the judiciary to adjudicate just about every single decision that the government makes. And, these are dually promulgated government decisions based upon dually promulgated Knesset laws, but the justices sitting in judgment get to decide whether the law is constitutional – Israel, by the way, has no constitution – or whether it's unconstitutional and whether it's reasonable or not reasonable, and they make up their standards as they go along.
A lot of these NGOs are very clear about what they want to do, and they say that their purpose in putting out these petitions is to gum up the works of Israel's government to make it impossible for the government to enact policies, and I'll just give you an example. They've gotten involved with military decision making. So, for instance, the IDF has a policy of not endangering soldiers when they're trying to arrest terrorists. So, they were using something that they referred to as the neighbor regulation, so that you would have a neighbor of a terrorist knock on the door where he was suspected of hiding so that he wouldn't get shot in opening up the door so that the IDF forces could go in and not get killed. These radical left organizations petitioned the court, say, "We think that's just wrong." And, the court said, "You know what? We think so too." And so, regulation that the IDF was using effectively and wasn't endangering the neighbors, because neighbors aren't being targeted by the terrorists, and it's protecting the lives of our soldiers is thrown away, because our radical justices decided that they didn't think it was a good idea.
And, this was done because, again, innocently the government, when it was set up in 1949 and on, they had this idea of how judges should be chosen, and so they put together a judicial selections committee that was comprised of members of the Knesset, of government ministers, or representatives of the bar association, and of sitting Supreme Court justices. And, what ended up happening was the Supreme Court over time was able to ensure that the justices sitting there went together with the bar association, and the politicians represented the government and the opposition inside of the Knesset. They had a permanent majority, so they were actually able to select their own members. And so, what we had over time as a result was an end of diversity on the court, not only on Supreme Court but on our lower courts.
Now, this in turn impacted the state prosecution, because among many of the things that the Supreme Court did was they made a rule in one of their judgments in a case called Pencassi where they said that if a sitting cabinet member or a government minister is indicted of a crime, he's forced to resign. So, that gave the power to determine who could sit in the government to the prosecution. If they chose to exploit this for ill, they could. They could get anybody fired simply by indicting them, and what happened as a result was that they went ahead and they began misusing this power so that we have had in a space of 10 years, we had three justice ministers indicted or threatened with indictment. Three? Let's see, we had Yacovney Aman. We had Socra Inigmy, Ruby Rifflin. Oh, and Hymrin, four. Four justice ministers were indicted during their period in power or one that was pending approval of his appointment as justice minister to prevent them from coming in or prevent them from reforming the justice system. So, we've had this situation with the justice minister. We've had it with a slew of other ministers as well in our government that have been prosecuted, and very rarely are they convicted. And, if they're convicted, they're convicted of crimes that could just as easily not have been prosecuted in the first place, because they were minor, but they were ways to get them out of politics, and certainly ways to get them out of the justice ministry.
So we've had this, and another thing that they did was that they took over the appointments process of senior government officials, like for instance the chief of staff of the IDF so that they used – there was a politic scandal over the appointment in 1997 of the attorney general, the first Natanyel of government. It was made up. It worked out that the scandal was incorrect. There was nothing to it. Their claim that Natanyel traded horses with a politician who was under police investigation that they would bring in an Attorney General that wouldn't pursue charges against him, and in exchange this other politician was going to vote in favor of an agreement to withdraw partially from Hevrone in the Hevrone deal from 1997. It worked out that this wasn't true, but this was put forward in the media, and they used the scandal over what was called the Barone Hevrone scandal to force the government to accept an appointments committee that got to decide who the attorney general and state prosecutor were going to be.
So, since 1997, the government is only allowed to choose among candidates that are preapproved for it to choose among for the attorney general and for the state prosecutor. So, the government doesn't actually have the ability to decide who's going to be in charge of the prosecution. The people who do have the responsibility are the judges, because I forgot to say that the chairman of the appointments committee is a retired Supreme Court justice so that the justices put themselves in charges of the appointments. That by doing that, they put themselves in charge of the attorney general and of the state prosecution. They have taken away the government's ability to adopt and implement policies through their open standing -- and they've made the army increasingly gun shy by entertaining petitions from these radical so‑called human rights organizations that keep alleging that our soldiers are war criminals.
So, we have a situation where over time our government has become increasingly powerless as our prosecution and our legal fraternity in general have become increasingly powerful. And, by the way, the stick of the imperial legal fraternity in Israel has not given anybody mercy. Bar association heads who are willing to engage with politicians to conduct reforms, for instance of the judicial selection process and the judicial selection committed, then find themselves under scurrilous and often criminally instigated criminal probes, and they are left with no recourse, because they're facing prosecutors who are entirely corrupt and judges who are entirely corrupt in terms of their total fealty to a system that brought them into power, which itself is corrupt and self-perpetuating.
So, this is a situation that has been brewing in Israel really since the early 1990s, again since our own Barack enacted to a sleepy Knesset full of people who had no idea what was going on, this judicial revolution that gave the Supreme Court of Israel unchecked powers over our politicians. So, why does that have anything to do with a political paralysis in Israel? Because they've also taken over the political calendar, and about 3 years ago I think it was that they started opening political probes or criminal probes against Prime Minister Netanyahu. And, these probes have been aggressively pursued and systematically leaked information from police investigations to the media. The media, by the way, is absolutely on board with this. All of the legal correspondence in the television are basically – they are completely dependent on this kind of machine of the legal fraternity to get all of their scoops and to get promoted. They, too, are self-perpetuating.
So, we started getting this sort of just sea of prejudicial leaks against the prime minister almost daily in the news, starting at the very outset of the investigations. And, right now we have three probes. They're called very sort of ominously Case 1000, Case 2000. There was a Case 3000 that everybody said that this was going to put Bibi away for life, but it worked out that he had nothing to do with anything, and so then they talk about Case 3000 but kind of whisper about it now, because they're a little bit embarrassed about it, but then there's Case 4000, which is a real zinger, and that's going to put him in the big house forever and ever and ever.
The problem is -- well, Case 1000 alleges that he received gifts to the tune of a million shekels, which is something like $330,000.00 from various wealthy friends of his in the form of cigars and bottles of champagne for his wife, Sara. So, it works out that it's less than that. It might be something more like $100,000.00, and it's over 15 years or whatever, but this is absurd. And, so they're saying that he should go to jail, because he accepted cigars from two or three different friends. So that's Case 1000, and it's piffle. I mean, it's sort of – that's like nothing.
And then, we have Case 2000 and Case 4000, which are much more problematic. They're problematic not only for the way that they have been sewn together but also because of their implications for the freedom of the press in Israel and for Israeli democracy in general, and I'll get to that in a second, but can somebody bring me a glass of water? Would that be possible? Anyway, Case 2000 alleges that ahead of the 2015 elections Netanyahu had a series of conversations with the publisher of what used to be, until my paper took over, the largest circulation paper in Israel called Yedioth Ahronoth. Yedioth Ahronoth is a very, very left-wing newspaper. It's a tabloid, and it's owner, Arnon Mozes, is probably the most powerful person in Israeli media, and he's very far to the left, and he's also very frightening to a lot of people, particularly to politicians, because people – I think politicians fear nothing more than they fear the media. And, they care about nothing more than they care about the media says about them. I had no idea how powerful the media was until this past year, but politicians are terrified of the media and totally dependent on them for their very existence. So, Noni Moses has been fighting a war to destroy Netanyahu for over 20 years, so Netanyahu was first elected to Prime Minister in his first term from '96 to '99, and, and from then on, his mission in life apparently has been to destroy Netanyahu and he's done a lot in order to get his way. So in 2015, Netanyahu started taping these conversations that he was having with Noni Moses and in these conversations, Noni Moses was asking him, in exchange for positive coverage, to convince Sheldon Adelson, the owner of Israel Hayom, the newspaper that I work for, to cut back on circulation of their Friday paper. Friday is like our Sunday paper and that if Noni would do that, I mean if Adelson would do that then Noni would give Netanyahu more positive coverage ahead of the 2015 election.
So Bibi was taping these conversations because he felt that he was being extorted by Noni Moses. These conversations were being taped by his then chief of staff, Ari Harow. The police opened up a corruption probe against Ari on something totally unrelated regarding alleged influence peddling from his position as chief of staff and the head of the World Likud Organization, and they did something unbelievable in the police. They said we'll give you leniency or whatever for this probe if you turn state witness against Netanyahu on something totally unrelated. This is not done. It's like saying we're going to get you off for armed robbery if you go after somebody totally unrelated to the probe against you for, I don't know, hanging puppies, and there's no connection between the two, but that's what they said because Ari had these conversation between Bibi and Noni Moses on his cell phone, and the police had taken the cell phone to pursue this influence peddling criminal probe against Ari. By the way, the police were opening up criminal probes against almost all of Netanyahu's senior aides, and basically denuding him of his entire staff one by one, which was something else which was completely unbelievable.
So the interesting thing about Case 2000 is that at the same time, you had politicians on the left who were drafting a new legislation called the Israel Hayom Law. Israel Hayom is a free paper, and they were drafting a law to prohibit Israel Hayom from being distributed for free and trying to force Adelson to begin charging for his newspaper, which is completely illegal in Israel because you have the right to run your business any way you want to. It's a free economy, and so you can't do that, but they were trying to regulate because they wanted to force it out of business. Forty-three members of Knesset voted for it. All of them received positive coverage from Yedioth Ahronoth, the biggest beneficiary of this law. The law itself was drafted by Yedioth Ahronoth's lawyers and it was submitted to the Knesset by a Labor politician named Akan Kabal who was never seriously investigated even though the coverage of Kabal went from negative to positive as soon as he became involved in drafting the law, and finally, then Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni passed a law into the Knesset against the advice of the Attorney General who said that it was unconstitutional and she too was the recipient of fantastic coverage by Yedioth Ahronoth. None of these people were ever investigated for receiving a bribe from Yedioth Ahronoth.
And the other thing that's interesting about it, of course, is that until they started investigating Netanyahu, nobody ever heard of the concept that positive media coverage could be considered a bribe because in no country on the face of the planet is positive coverage considered a bribe because if positive coverage is considered a bribe, then journalism as a point of fact is a criminal enterprise, and I don't care what you think about media this or media that, the very concept that a journalist writing positively about a politician has accepted a bribe or this is part of the quid pro quo, means that there can be no press freedom in your society because everybody has to worry that they're going to be pulled before police investigators based upon what he or she writes. So it's very frightening, but it's also here what we see in Case 2000 is selective enforcement of the most profound type against Netanyahu, and also, we have to bear in mind that Netanyahu never received positive coverage at all.
Finally, the most important case that's being pushed against him is called Case 4000. Case 4000 is very convoluted on the face, but it's also very simple. Netanyahu for a brief period, served as well as Minister of Communications. Well, not that brief, I think it was over a year from around 2015 to around 2016 in his last term of office, and in the period preceding his takeover of the Ministry of Communications, three was a big regulation reform of the telecommunication sector in Israel, and Israel's largest telephone company, Bezek, was given permission after a long legal process to merge with one of Israel's television providers, a satellite television provider in Israel. It's a company called Yes, and the reason it's important is because like you have in America with Comcast and all these others that you have bundling, so that you get Internet, television, cellular telephone, and landline from one provider and you can get different services based upon these bundles of services that you can get from one provider.
So the idea of merging Bezek and Yes was that it would improve consumer service. It was also that one of the criteria for enabling this was that Bezek was then going to be forced to provide infrastructure for I think it was cable. I can't remember, to the periphery of Israel. So you have much faster service, or it was high speed Internet. You have much faster Internet say in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem than you might have in a place like Dimona in the Negev, okay. So this was all being done by regulators and the telecommunications sector. Bezek is owned by a then billionaire named Shel Alowich and he and his wife, Eris, happen to be good friends with the Netanyahus. Now, they also own a web site called Walla. Walla is a big web site. It's mainly shopping, but it also has a news port, a Walla News, which is like almost every web site and almost every news site and newspaper and news channel or television station, it is left wing. So Alowich and his wife are not, and they're good friends with the Netanyahus, and Bibi was demanding good coverage from Walla, from his friend, saying why aren't you giving me good coverage and, you know, Sara was saying why are you printing ugly pictures of me, and stuff like that, you know, like politicians say during almost every day, you know, how dare you, why'd you give him credit for my law when I wrote it, and you're mean and I hate you, and everything else.
So what the police are saying, and in the meantime, this again was before the 2015 elections, was that there was an improvement in Walla's coverage of the Netanyahus that was happening at the same time as the merger between Bezek owned by Alowich, was with Yes, the television provider was being approved by the regulators who were operating under Netanyahu, who was then Communications Minister, and therefore, the quid pro quo here was that Alowich received regulatory treatment that earned him a billion shekels in profits, which by the way is totally false, but who cares, in exchange for having 2 ½ pro-Netanyahu articles and a nice picture of Sara Netanyahu on Walla News Service, and therefore, this the proof that Netanyahu received a bribe in the form of positive coverage for a regulatory favor that he did. It doesn't matter that Netanyahu was just a rubber stamp for a regulatory process that had preceded his entry into office by 3 years that had been prolonged, that had gone through every regulatory body before he had anything to do with it.
There was no proof whatsoever that he had anything to do with it or that the decision that was made by the regulators was wrong, that is, that it somehow or another abused the public trust. To the contrary, it gave better service to Israeli consumers, particularly in the peripheral areas of Israel, but this is the case. Now the thing about it again is that what they're saying here is nothing, I didn't receive a penny, money, not in campaign contributions, not in cold hard cash, not in a Swiss bank account, nowhere. He got no money. He got no fancy furniture. He didn't get a pet horse. He got nothing, okay, but he did get, according to the prosecutors, he got better coverage in Walla. Of course, the coverage, 90 percent of the articles written about Netanyahu were horrible, but 10 percent weren't. So he is a felon. He committed a felony. Now the problem here, I mean there are 150 million problems here, but one of the problems here that's much larger than Netanyahu is that if you can claim, again, that positive coverage of a politician by a news source is bribery, then all journalism is criminal.
All relations between journalists and politicians are immediately suspect and can lead to anybody involved, editors, journalists, media owners to find themselves under criminal investigation, and all of this is happening, amazingly, with the great support of the Israeli media. Now why is it happening with the great support of the Israeli media? Well, for two reasons. The first is that our media, as I said, is terrible. Now I went into the media, I went into journalism 19 years ago because I figured somebody had to say something that wasn't a lie, you know, and anyway, I didn't have anything better to do, so I just figured I might as well start writing, but that was really why I went into the journalism world, and I was very innocent about the whole thing, but it is really quite spectacular to see all of our networks, such as they are in Israel, standing beside the state prosecutors and the police investigators as they criminalize our profession.
And why is this happening? Again, it's happening for two reasons, and by the way, this is all like a joint enterprise of the media and the state prosecution/police. Why? Because for the past 3 years, they have, again, on a daily basis almost, put out selective prejudicial leaks from confidential police interrogations of suspects, and by the way, they've hauled in Netanyahu's closest advisors as criminal suspects to coerce them into becoming state's witnesses against the Premier, and it worked in both Case 4000 and 2000 with his closest aides, by threatening to destroy their lives, humiliate them. One of them they had evidence that he was carrying out an affair and they threatened, and now, of course, I don't know what's going to happen to his marriage because it's all over the press, but that they were going to release it and his wife and children were going to leave him, and they were going to destroy him economically, and lo and behold, and he was incarcerated for 15 nights and days in a flea-ridden jail cell, this was the senior advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel, until they broke him. And they did something very similar, and I've heard even worse, to the then Director General of Administrative Communications, again, one of Netanyahu's longest serving, closest advisors. So they've done all of this and we're watching.
Now I said why don't we have a government, because they've controlled the electoral calendar with these probes. So for instance, the first election of this year was held on April 9, 40 days before the election. In an unprecedented move in Israeli history, the Attorney General decided to publish the, what would you call it, the preparatory findings. So what happens is, is the police completed their investigation. Everybody knew that they wanted to indict him for bribery and breach of trust, and all these other things, but bribery is the big on in Case 4000, but it wasn't official. That was what the police wanted, and the police themselves are a completely separate kettle of fish, but have also been deeply corrupt over the past 20 years and politicized. So they had already leaked, and then published officially that they thought that Bibi has to go into the big house. Then it was up to the Attorney General. Now what happens with the Attorney General in criminal prosecutions of this kind or investigations of this kind is that they do something, which in and of itself is sort of a perversion of justice, where they give a hearing, a pre‑indictment hearing to the senior official that's being investigated, so that the Attorney General acts as a quasi-judicial body so that he receives all of the evidence and holds a sort of trial where the accused is allowed not to face his accusers, god forbid, but to give his side after he supposedly received most of the, or all of the prosecution's material and pre‑appeal hearing discovery after a 3-year investigation.
So Netanyahu hadn't gotten his hearing yet. Forty days before the election on April 9, Mandelblit, our Attorney General decided to release his preliminary recommendations pending hearing, which was indict, indict, indict, and this is in the middle of an election. So he's saying in the middle of an election, I'm going to indict the Prime Minister, and that doesn't have any impact on the election? Of course it does. So that was his first decision to act entirely politically. There's no legal precedent for any of this behavior. It's totally extra-legal that the Attorney General decided to become the most important politician in the election and of course, his name wasn't on any ballot, and he wasn't chosen by the government. He was chosen by the Supreme Court and forced upon the government. So that was stunning and it did have an impact.
The Likud did well, and then by the way, the Supreme Court also is in charge of the elections, because a Supreme Court justice is in charge of the Elections Commission. So he gets to decide what you're allowed to say, what you're not allowed to say on air in the last 30 days before the election. He is allowed to say what's illegal propaganda and what isn't, and he's the one who decides whether you have to have a recount of suspected ballots. So there was massive voter fraud documented in Arab villages that gave two extra mandates to Arab political parties at the expense of the right. There was undercounting in other areas where it looked as though the right received more votes so that if this hadn't happened, you would've had profoundly different electoral results on April 9, but they decided not to recount in certain ballots, and yes, to recount in other ballots, in a way that manifestly assisted the left and harmed the right in a very serious way, and I'm not going to get into all of the weeds here, but at the end, Netanyahu wasn't able to form a government and he decided to go to new election. Call new elections, Knesset disbanded, go to new elections, and here, you know, we've got this sort of hung Knesset. So the new latest update is that Benny Gantz, the head of the Blue and White Party, intends to form a minority coalition with these pro-Hamas Arab parties, and supporting them from the outside, so giving Hamas effective veto power over government policy, and all this why, to eject Netanyahu from office because Blue and White says well, we don't mind having a unity government with Likud, but only after Netanyahu resigned. We're going to decide for voters who gets to be the head of Likud, and a word about Blue and White.
Blue and White is a party that's run by three former chiefs of staff and one media star, okay. Now what's interesting about these chiefs of staff? I started saying you can't really think about Iran. Well, let's think about Iran for a second. In 2012, 2010 we had a Chief of Staff named Gabi Ashkenazi, who was No. 4 in Blue and White. Gabi Ashkenazi together with then Mossad head, Meir Dagan refused an order that Netanyahu gave them to prepare the military to attack Iran's nuclear installation. This all came out before the 2012 Presidential elections in November, and Meir Dagan told Leon Panetta about the order to get the Obama administration to prevent it from happening, which is treason. So they refused this order to prepare the military and the Mossad for an imminent attack against Iran.
Then after Ashkenazi who came in, Benny Gantz, who is No. 1 on the Blue and White list. Now Benny Gantz was not the first choice of the government as Chief of Staff. The person who was chosen was Yoav Galant who was the Deputy Chief of staff of the IBF at the time, and all of a sudden, an NGO nobody had ever heard of called something like the Green Lobby, petitions the Supreme Court, said Galant is unfit to serve as the Chief of Staff because he expropriated land in his moshav to build a driveway for his house, and therefore, he's a crook and he shouldn't be approved by the appointments committee. And the Attorney General at the time, this man named Yehuda Weinstein, told the government that he wouldn't defend the government's decision to appoint Galant to be the Chief of Staff before the court, which effectively ended his ability to be appointed. This was after his appointment was already confirmed by the government. So they weren't allowed to even choose the Chief of Staff of the Army, and instead, who comes in, Benny Gantz.
So we see here that we have a situation. Blue and White’s party platform is no interference with prerogatives of the judiciary, no interference, no judicial reform, no legal reform, no governmental interference with decision making of the general staff of the Army. So what they're saying is that their platform is to denude the Israeli politicians of all power to govern, and to give all of the power of elected politicians to our unelected bureaucrats, to our deep shtetel. And now, the news reports are saying they want to unseat Netanyahu so badly that they're willing to form a minority government with outside support from Hamas supporting Arab parties.
So this is where we're standing right now in Israel, and in the meantime, and, you know, this has all been published, but, you know, you're talking about elites, who like in the United States, have literally no shame and no fear, I mean to the point where before Shabbat, or I landed here on Friday, Shai Nitzan, who is the prosecutor, who is simply out of control, he wrote a letter to a group of alumni of the state prosecution, including one sitting Supreme Court justice and three district court judges including two on the Tel Aviv District Court that would be sitting in judgment of Netanyahu if he gets indicted, telling them these are the talking points of the prosecution against its critics. Please go out and get interviewed and use them, which is, you know, by the way, that would be a bribe, right, according to his own definition of what a bribe is, that he's asking for positive coverage. So he's soliciting a bribe that he should be under his own bizarre, anti-democratic totalitarian definition of bribery. He should now be subjected to a criminal probe for sending out that email, but whatever the case.
And so now where does it all stand? Shai Nitzan finishes his term sometime this month or at the beginning of December, so they're saying that Mandelblit has decided that he is going to make a decision about whether or not to indict Netanyahu in accordance with Shai Nitzan's tenure. So he's going to make it in the next week or 2, so that Shai Nitzan gets to leave a clean house. He gets to put away the Prime Minister and go off under a halo of glory that he was the one who killed the king, and the thing of it is, these cases are obscene. They themselves are illegal. They themselves are criminal, and yet our judiciary has become so radicalized, and our state prosecution is so contemptuous of the public that has no power over them whatsoever, that they couldn't care less. They couldn't care less. So really, the only thing that we have going for us is the public themselves, and so you have a lot of people who are getting up and they're protesting, and they're staging these protests outside of Avichai Mandelblit, the Attorney General's home to try to put pressure on him not to destroy Israeli democracy and not to unseat a Prime Minister who has committed no crime under any normal rulebook, and to not destroy Israeli democracy.
Is this going to help? I don't know, but we have one of the organizers of these protests you've all got, is here as well from Israel, and a few weeks ago, he asked me to speak at one of the protests and to say, you know, there are about 5,00 people there and the media reported it as something like, I don't know, like a thousand, and so Israel, there were a few hundred people there, 10,000 people there, yeah, you know, maybe 800 people, but we don't see anybody, and everybody's screaming in the background. They just don't want to hear, and the idea is to try to depress belief that we can actually make a difference. And by the way, I'll just tell you one more thing, which is that, you know, in April, Netanyahu's platform, and this was after in 2015, and then 2012, he made people like myself incredibly frustrated because he refused to run on a platform at all. His platform was applying Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and massive legal reform in Israel. And so they knew what was coming down the pike, and now, we're facing a situation where in order to avert the public will from being followed, we may find ourselves being governed by Hamas because the people who are pushing this are motivated now by an ideology that exists, that is entirely based on hatred of the right. It's not based on peace. They know there's no peace. It's not based on the idea that if we run away, you know, that the Arabs will leave us alone. They know that's not true. It's just based on a raw and insatiable desire to have power, power for power's sake, and if that doesn't work well enough, three of the heads of Blue and White have criminal probes hanging over their head so that if they ever step out of line, they know that they'll find themselves under investigation faster than they can say I hate Bibi, okay.
So all of this is happening now, and so when you think about your deep state here in the United States, understand that apparently, what's happening here is part of a much larger phenomenon in the western world. We obviously see it with Brexit and with the European Commission, and all of the bureaucrats in Europe that are making directives against the peoples of Europe, denying them their self-determination and their liberty. So we're seeing this as part of a very big phenomenon, and when you talk about populism, it's not really so much populism. I don't know what you would call it except that we just want to be able to govern ourselves. I mean I don't think it's a populist thing to say that laws should have meaning and Lady Justice is supposed to be blind, and you cannot have selective enforcement of laws, and you cannot have appointed bureaucrats dictating what our government can and cannot do based upon their own ideological proclivities.
So we're going to continue. I, and thankfully, there are a lot of people now as Ushai said, who are fighting the good fight in Israeli journalism. My paper has been working very hard to make sure that the truth and the fullness of the story is known to the public in a way that it would never have been known before, and so that's really what's happening with us, and I think that I've overplayed by card and everybody wants to hear my really good friend, David Goldman, talking about China. So I'm going to just leave it at that and one last thing. We have one clip of me saying one sentence in English at this one protest that I spoke at, and so you can all see me, the rabble-rouser, as I walk off the stage, if we can go to the videotape?
Thank you very much.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/caroline-glick-speaks-restoration-weekend-2019-frontpagemagcom/
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1 comment:
Maybe there does need to be a civil war, in Israel. But it must be a civil war, within the government, not within the people; just like here in the US.
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