Law professor Moshe Cohen-Eliya on Monday seized on leaked recordings of a senior police officer to launch a scathing attack on Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, calling her "the head of the Israeli mafia."
The recordings, released by journalist Amit Segal on Channel 12 News, feature Boaz Blat, head of the Israel Police Investigations and Intelligence Division, accusing the State Attorney's Office of keeping criminal files open against citizens as leverage and harshly criticizing the Department of Internal Police Investigations (Mahash).
"They use the police as a tool," Blat is heard saying. "There are quite a few cases where any reasonable person understands these are drawer files, you know, pressure levers on people. They put them in a drawer and do nothing with them for a year. They use the same tools on police officers through Mahash. You step out of line on something, and all it takes is to call you in for a session in 'the thinking chair.'"
Cohen-Eliya, a prominent critic of Israel's legal establishment, noted that Blat is himself considered close to the attorney general. "And this is being said by a Baharav-Miara loyalist," he wrote, "someone who works around the clock to bury the Military Advocate General affair and save Baharav-Miara's skin, who didn't even bother to summon her for open testimony in an affair whose investigation she oversaw, and in which she submitted a false affidavit to the High Court on the MAG's behalf."
He also cited recent claims by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir that Baharav-Miara "squeezes" Police Commissioner Danny Levy, screaming at him in meetings, and, according to Ben Gvir, holding him over an alleged suspicion of illegal construction at his home.
"Extortion through threats"
"Gali Baharav-Miara is the head of the Israeli mafia," Cohen-Eliya wrote. He pointed to former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit's complaint to Efi Naveh that then–State Attorney Shai Nitzan was "holding him by the throat," and to the summoning of Minister Miki Zohar for questioning after he crossed the State Attorney's Office.
He accused prosecutors of using "violent mafia methods" to pressure Shlomo Filber, Nir Hefetz and Shaul Elovitch and his family into turning state's witness in the Netanyahu cases.
"Extortion through threats is the norm for those who hold most of the centers of power in this country," he wrote, citing the reservist protest groups Brothers in Arms and Forum 555, which he accused of threatening to "collapse the army" unless the government dropped its amendment to the reasonableness standard. He also claimed the chareidi community was being threatened that "if you don't join a government under our leadership, Baharav-Miara will pursue you with arrest warrants everywhere."
Cohen-Eliya accused the legal establishment of inventing the idea of declaring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu legally incapacitated as a way to remove him "if he behaves in a way that doesn't serve their interests," calling it "a delusion that exists in only one country on earth, the state of the Israeli juristocracy."
Draft law talks
He also addressed reports that Gadi Eisenkot's team is negotiating with the chareidi parties over the draft law, with legal figures allegedly offering guarantees. "Who is sitting in these discussions? Are Baharav-Miara and Yitzchak Amit involved?" he wrote. "The chutzpah and arrogance of these corrupt people reach new heights every day. They have no boundaries. They have no G-d."
Cohen-Eliya also took aim at remarks Baharav-Miara made Sunday at a State Attorney's Office conference in Eilat, where she called the government's proposed changes to the Mahash law "a poison pill injected into the law enforcement system that dismantles from within the principle of non-politicization and equality before the law."
"Just a reminder: the police used to investigate complaints against their own officers, which was rightly compared to letting the cat guard the cream," he wrote. "So oversight was moved to the State Attorney's Office, on the assumption it could be trusted more.
"Israel is indeed a state of legal apartheid. But those who dismantled 'the principle of non-politicization and equality before the law' are the corrupt members of the Israeli juristocracy, led by Baharav-Miara and Yitzchak Amit."
