Israel's High Court of Justice issued an interim order Wednesday freezing the appointment of attorney Michael Rabilo, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's former personal lawyer, to the position of State Comptroller, dealing a blow to Netanyahu just days before Ravilo was set to take office.
The five-justice panel, headed by Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit alongside Deputy President Noam Sohlberg and Justices Daphne Barak-Erez, Gila Canfy-Steinitz and Ruth Ronen, ruled unanimously that the appointment will remain frozen until a final ruling is issued on the petitions challenging Rabilo's election. The judges said the freeze was necessary given the tight timeline created by the end of the term of the outgoing comptroller, Matanyahu Englman, and to give the court sufficient time to formulate its final decision.
Englman is set to conclude his term on Friday, and Rabilo had been scheduled to begin his own term on Sunday. As a practical result of the freeze, Israel will be left without a sitting State Comptroller once Englman's term ends, unless the court rules quickly on the petitions. In the interim, the Comptroller's office and its staff will continue operating under the leadership of the office's director general, Yishai Waknin.
The petitions center on the second round of Knesset voting in which Rabilo was elected, after opposition lawmakers alleged that coalition members were pressured to photograph their secret ballots behind the voting booth curtain to prove they had voted for Ravilo, Netanyahu's own former private attorney, in violation of the Basic Law on the State Comptroller, which mandates a secret ballot. Former Supreme Court Justice Yosef Elron, who lost the vote to Rabilo, later joined the petitioners himself, arguing the second vote was unlawful and asking the court to order it redone.
During Sunday's hearing, the justices signaled they were prepared to order the Knesset to hold a new vote over the ballot secrecy violations, after the Knesset speaker, Amir Ohana, rejected the court's earlier proposal to hold a repeat vote following the first hearing. When the Knesset's legal representative, attorney Yitzhak Bart, argued that annulling and rerunning the vote would be an extremely drastic step, Justice Barak-Erez pushed back, saying it isn't necessarily more drastic, calling it a relatively simple procedure that carries no additional cost and can be repeated without difficulty.
The reactions broke down sharply along political lines. The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, which petitioned against Ravilo's selection, welcomed the interim order and said an appointment born in sin and passed through an unlawful vote should be cancelled, adding it would be better if Rabilo withdrew his own candidacy. Opposition leader Yair Lapid praised the ruling, saying the vote had been contaminated and that Netanyahu's private lawyer could not be allowed to take the position.
On the other side, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich condemned the decision, accusing the court's leadership of repeatedly crossing red lines by blocking appointments backed by the national camp. Likud MK Chanoch Milwidsky said the court's ruling should simply be ignored, calling it unlawful.
