The cabinet meeting which took place via video conference on Monday afternoon was supposed to be one of the highlights of the new government’s first year in power.
Attorney Generals are replaced only once every six years and this wasn’t just an appointment of the head of the Israeli legal establishment. It followed a long, pitched battle for political control.
If there was one thing that former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was hoping to achieve in his four election campaigns of 2019-2021, it was influence over that process of appointing the next Attorney General.
Whoever occupies that office in the bleak office block on Salah a-Din Street in east Jerusalem is in charge of every court case in which the State of Israel is involved. Every charge sheet. Every plea bargain.
There’s a long list of reasons why the government he formed after the third of the elections in 2020, together with Benny Gantz, lasted less than six months. At the top of that list was the struggle over senior appointments in the Justice Ministry, which Mr Netanyahu was forced to hand over to a member of Mr Gantz’s Blue and White Party.
And if there was one moment which epitomised the fact that Mr Netanyahu is no longer in power, it was when Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar – one of his most bitter foes – brought his own candidate, Gali Baharav-Miara, for the cabinet’s approval.
The first woman to serve as Israel’s Attorney General, Ms Baharav-Miara was not an obvious candidate. She had a solid, if lacklustre record in the State Prosecutor’s Office, before moving to the private sector seven years ago.
The main item on her CV is an eight-year stint as head of the civil division in the Tel Aviv District, the largest unit in the Justice Ministry. But there were more senior candidates available, with experience of working on sensitive matters of state in the Attorney General’s office.
It was hard to escape the impression that Mr Sa’ar, who has wide-reaching plans to reform the system and split the responsibilities of the powerful Attorney General in two (separating the chief legal counsel role from that of the head of the prosecution) had selected Ms Baharav-Miara because more opinionated candidates would have tried to stand in his way.
Meanwhile, she could be relied upon to continue prosecuting Mr Netanyahu, unless he agreed to sign a plea-bargain which would spell the end of his political career.
But the Justice Minister’s moment of triumph was marred on Monday afternoon. The new Attorney General was voted through unanimously, but that was no longer the main focus of the cabinet meeting. Instead, the agenda was dominated by ministers clamouring for a commission of enquiry into the Pegasus scandal.
Surely, reports that police had used the feared Pegasus software in order to carry out illegal surveillance – on senior government officials, protest leaders, mayors, businesspeople, journalists and one of Mr Netanyahu’s sons – warrants no less.
Assuming such a commission is appointed, as now seems inevitable, its findings could disrupt not only the Netanyahu trial, where some of the key witnesses were also allegedly targeted by Pegasus, but also any plans Mr Sa’ar and Ms Baharav-Miara have for the justice system – and much more besides.
Spicy... but no source
The series of reports in the Calcalist daily business paper on alleged misuse by the Israeli police of the Pegasus spyware system seems to defy journalistic logic. Normally, when one reporter breaks an important scoop, after a day or two, their competitors manage to get in on the story and corroborate at least parts of it through their own sources and even report on new details.
In the case of the Pegasus story, however, so far exclusively reported by Tomer Ganon, the entire Israeli media community is still in darkness.
This is very different from the “Pegasus Project”, a consortium of media organisations which has documented multiple cases in which Pegasus has been used outside Israel, by countries to which the system was sold by its developers the NSO Group. In the current series of reports, no forensic evidence has yet been produced to back up the claims, and not even the vaguest of sources are being cited.
One basic fact has been acknowledged by police: that they have been using Pegasus, a “weapons-grade” hacking tool which normally would be deployed only by intelligence services, and not for routine domestic policing.
But the rest of the details in Mr Ganon’s stories, the long list of targets and the fact that much of the surveillance was carried out without the judicial oversight required by law, has yet to be confirmed by any other source.
Veterans of Israel’s intelligence community and the cyber industry are stumped as well. They all agree that if the police were using Pegasus in such a way it is a “crazy criminal scandal”, as one of them described it.
But they all seem sceptical that such a thing could have taken place, undetected, for so long. Especially in a leak-prone organisation like the police.
At this point, there are only three plausible scenarios. Some people have speculated that the previous police commissioner, Roni Alsheikh, who spearheaded the Netanyahu investigations, used his experience as a former Shin Bet spy-chief to form within the police a “black unit” of surveillance experts, accountable to no-one, who ran roughshod over the law in pursuit of their targets.
That is the preferred narrative of Mr Netanyahu and his supporters, who claim that the whole investigation against him, and therefore the trial, is criminally tainted. Mr Alsheikh has finally spoken out, saying: “The reports have no connection to reality”.
It’s also possible that a lone rogue operator in the police was using the system for motives which are still unknown.
The third scenario? The misuse of Pegasus was not as widespread or criminal as reported and Calcalist has somehow been used as a tool of misinformation. If that was the case, the question will be: Who had an interest in doing so?
NSO Group executives and employees are embedded in Israel’s business and intelligence communities and have close ties with both the last government and the current one. The findings of the commission of enquiry will be explosive and unpredictable.
Iran deal or no deal
As if the government doesn’t have enough to worry about right now, any moment news of the US and Iran agreeing on a resumption of the nuclear deal that Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018 could come from Vienna.
Mr Bennett and his team have long understood President Biden is determined to return to the deal signed by his old boss, Barack Obama. They are resigned to the fact there’s nothing Israel can do to prevent that outcome. Unlike Mr Netanyahu, who went to Congress in 2015 to lobby against the Iran Deal, his successor is trying to mitigate its effects by minimising disagreements with Biden administration.
If the Vienna talks, as expected, result in a return to the agreement, Mr Bennett will attempt to downplay the whole issue, especially as it will be another opportunity for Mr Netanyahu to attack him.
Instead, we will hear much more about expensive new weapons programmes, like the new laser missile-defence system. Israel’s new plan is to try and spend Iran into the ground with the best technology money can buy and Israelis can develop. Including the next generation of Pegasus, of course.
