6 ms·

Israeli Police Recommend Indicting Netanyahu in Telecom Case

92 points by jbegley 8y ago

yaakov34 8y ago
A slowly developing putsch by the Israeli bureacracy against the elected politicians. Welcomed by those who want those politicians gone, not welcomed by the rest. I would instead think ahead and decide how much I like the idea of rule by bureacracy vs. elections.
- techntoke 8y ago
  The rest do want him gone as well. He is as corrupt as Trump.
  - yaakov34 8y ago
    Given that he is at the peak of his popularity and his coalition is expected to win reelection in a landslide - I doubt that the people you've been talking to are a representative sample.
  - golemiprague 8y ago
    Both are not particularly corrupt, with the amount of investigations their political opponents spawn against them you would expect something to stick. I would say that Netanyahu is probably one of the least corrupt PM in Israel ever. Just for comparison, it took the system exactly half an year to find something against Olmert and putting him in Jail. Same thing goes for Trump, it is all vitriol and exaggeration by his political opponents, there is nothing particularly corrupt about Trump, if there was they would have found it long time ago with all the effort and money they put into investigating him. My bet is that this "recommendation" which came out at the last day of the current chief of police will not hold once they go through the legal inspection by the attorney general and certainly will not hold in court.
- justin66 8y ago
  > I would instead think ahead and decide how much I like the idea of rule by bureacracy vs. elections. I might take some interest in whether or not the criminal allegations are true and supported by evidence.
ryanlol 8y ago
>"The police recommendations regarding me and my wife don't surprise anyone," Netanyahu said in a statement. "These recommendations were decided upon and leaked even before the investigation began." Isn't this entirely normal for criminal investigations? First you decide that someone is probably doing something bad, then you investigate and indict?
- dogma1138 8y ago
  No, the investigation is performed in order to decide if there is sufficient evidence to recommend an indictment. The investigation is the part in which they collect the evidence, witness statements and perform a review of the case. Then they pass their recommendation for a judicial review which would review the case and take into consideration the recommendation of the investigators and decide if there is sufficient evidence to proceed with an indictment or not, then it goes to the state attorney which has the final say. If indicted the PM can appeal to the parliament within 30 days to request immunity, however an immunity as far as I know never been granted and over the past few decades Israel has indicted and prosecuted several high ranking politicians including former PMs so their judicial system seems to work pretty well. The statement was referring to the claim that the recommendation text was leaked prior to the investigation being completed apparently the text was very simmilar to some leaked documents form 2 years ago. Essentially over the past few years every month or so there was a leak that said an indictment will be recommended sometimes accompanied by the text of the recommendation, but this time it was an official recommendation. Likely they had the legal text recommending an indictment worked on before the investigation was completed as it likely would demand quite a bit of work and approval to meet the legal nuances required for such a document.
- smsm42 8y ago
  Not really, the purpose of investigation is to find out whether the crime actually happened and whether it can be proven (sometimes it may be either a mistake or deliberately misleading change by somebody with much to gain if the accused person is hurt, and police can check legal dealings by senior politicians to ensure they are indeed legal), so the outcome of the investigation is not known upfront, and can come out any way, depending on the evidence. What Netanyahu is saying, that it wasn't a honest investigation since the investigators were intending, for political reasons, to recommend to indict regardless of what the actual evidence - unknown to them by then - showed. Whether it is true or not, I don't know - in Israeli politics there's a fair share of both crooked politicians and biased policing, so could be either way (or even both ways). The boundaries between business and politics are not very thick in Israel anyway, so there's a lot of space for both corrupt dealings and accusations in such without hard proof (which is sometimes very hard to come by and relies on "he said/she said" evidence).
onetimemanytime 8y ago
>>The case revolves around suspicions that confidants of Netanyahu promoted regulations worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bezeq telecom company in exchange for positive coverage of the prime minister on Bezeq's subsidiary news website, Walla. If true, lifetime ban from politics and 20 years in jail. This is messing with the core of democracy--and by using state /people's money. Those hundreds of millions in "gifts" are a cost to Israeli people.
- smsm42 8y ago
  Wait, isn't that what every populist politician doing every day - doing something beneficial to an interest group X in exchange for being praised by this interest group and thus raising his chances of being elected again? If a politician recommends a subsidy to the solar industry, knowing he would be positively covered in New York Times and MSNBC, or, alternatively, proposes an increased military budget, knowing Fox News and Rush Limbaugh would praise him for that - is that something that one has to be jailed for? I am afraid if we'd do that then it'd make most sense to just convert the Capitol Hill to a jail, and the same with every state legislature, because everybody there would be jailed anyway.
tracer4201 8y ago
Question for any Israelis- My view of that region has been that in general, Israel is trying to do the right thing, although inidividual actors might attack Palestinian civilians and then get court martial. Palestinian leadership is broken with competing Hamas and Palestinian Authority with open or at least covert support of terrorism. How are Israel’s politics internally? I fear an Israeli leader who is corrupt and doesn’t care for Israeli people or loss of Palestinian civilians could very easily take the Trump path. It would be easy to blame Palestinians for every problem, just as Trump blames Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants (legal or illegal) or some other ethnic group inside Israel to unite the people with electoral power while the leadership gets away with corruption or outright war crimes in the name of defense. This is not meant to be a Israel v. Palestine conversation, but just about Israel’s internal politics. Just want to learn.
- golergka 8y ago
  Internally it's the same right vs left conflict that you see in many other westernized countries, only magnified by the conflict. But in a very strange and un-hawkish move, after 500 rockets have been fired on Israel in 24 hours, Bibi didn't order any serious retaliation and deescalated instead. Coalition broke down, so now we're up for election on our hands, and Liberman, who resigned in protest against this decision, have seemingly got a lot of points. However, I'm very curious about Bibi, because his main focus for the last few years have been international relations. His frequent visits, and building a lot of ties with muslim and muslim-friendly countries didn't win him a lot support domestically, but it may just be the key to solving the conflict. Especially in this recent situation, there are strong rumours that the main reason he decided not to allow escalation was his desire to demonstrate his reliableness to other middle eastern powers that got tired of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood in general. There's a lot of talk about how corrupt Bibi and his family is; but you have to take it in context, compared to western countries. All Israeli PMs (except for Gold Meir) have always been highly decorated combat military veterans, who have gone into harm's way again and again to serve their country and protect their countrymen. So while it's conceivable that they would give favourable government contracts to their friends and get a couple of millions reached from shady dealings, I don't think that a person with such history wouldn't care for his people.
beagle3 8y ago
Israel has some of the best/worst politicians money can buy - but it is not shy about putting them in jail. A previous PM (Olmert) spent time in jail, as did a previous president (Katzav, this is a ceremonial job, with queen-of-england style responsibilities) and quite a few ministers.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  Unfortunately that hints to me that risk of jail doesn't solve the problem.
  - keyme 8y ago
    Yup. The current minister of interior has already been in jail once, for offenses committed as the minister of interior (10 years or so ago).
  - Joakal 8y ago
    Is recidivism high? If they're all been jailed once, it looks like the jails rehabilitate instead of acting as a deterrent?

92 points by jbegley 8y ago

A slowly developing putsch by the Israeli bureacracy against the elected politicians. Welcomed by those who want those politicians gone, not welcomed by the rest. I would instead think ahead and decide how much I like the idea of rule by bureacracy vs. elections.

techntoke 8y ago
The rest do want him gone as well. He is as corrupt as Trump.
- yaakov34 8y ago
  Given that he is at the peak of his popularity and his coalition is expected to win reelection in a landslide - I doubt that the people you've been talking to are a representative sample.
- golemiprague 8y ago
  Both are not particularly corrupt, with the amount of investigations their political opponents spawn against them you would expect something to stick. I would say that Netanyahu is probably one of the least corrupt PM in Israel ever. Just for comparison, it took the system exactly half an year to find something against Olmert and putting him in Jail. Same thing goes for Trump, it is all vitriol and exaggeration by his political opponents, there is nothing particularly corrupt about Trump, if there was they would have found it long time ago with all the effort and money they put into investigating him. My bet is that this "recommendation" which came out at the last day of the current chief of police will not hold once they go through the legal inspection by the attorney general and certainly will not hold in court.
justin66 8y ago
> I would instead think ahead and decide how much I like the idea of rule by bureacracy vs. elections. I might take some interest in whether or not the criminal allegations are true and supported by evidence.

ryanlol 8y ago

>"The police recommendations regarding me and my wife don't surprise anyone," Netanyahu said in a statement. "These recommendations were decided upon and leaked even before the investigation began." Isn't this entirely normal for criminal investigations? First you decide that someone is probably doing something bad, then you investigate and indict?

dogma1138 8y ago
No, the investigation is performed in order to decide if there is sufficient evidence to recommend an indictment. The investigation is the part in which they collect the evidence, witness statements and perform a review of the case. Then they pass their recommendation for a judicial review which would review the case and take into consideration the recommendation of the investigators and decide if there is sufficient evidence to proceed with an indictment or not, then it goes to the state attorney which has the final say. If indicted the PM can appeal to the parliament within 30 days to request immunity, however an immunity as far as I know never been granted and over the past few decades Israel has indicted and prosecuted several high ranking politicians including former PMs so their judicial system seems to work pretty well. The statement was referring to the claim that the recommendation text was leaked prior to the investigation being completed apparently the text was very simmilar to some leaked documents form 2 years ago. Essentially over the past few years every month or so there was a leak that said an indictment will be recommended sometimes accompanied by the text of the recommendation, but this time it was an official recommendation. Likely they had the legal text recommending an indictment worked on before the investigation was completed as it likely would demand quite a bit of work and approval to meet the legal nuances required for such a document.
smsm42 8y ago
Not really, the purpose of investigation is to find out whether the crime actually happened and whether it can be proven (sometimes it may be either a mistake or deliberately misleading change by somebody with much to gain if the accused person is hurt, and police can check legal dealings by senior politicians to ensure they are indeed legal), so the outcome of the investigation is not known upfront, and can come out any way, depending on the evidence. What Netanyahu is saying, that it wasn't a honest investigation since the investigators were intending, for political reasons, to recommend to indict regardless of what the actual evidence - unknown to them by then - showed. Whether it is true or not, I don't know - in Israeli politics there's a fair share of both crooked politicians and biased policing, so could be either way (or even both ways). The boundaries between business and politics are not very thick in Israel anyway, so there's a lot of space for both corrupt dealings and accusations in such without hard proof (which is sometimes very hard to come by and relies on "he said/she said" evidence).

onetimemanytime 8y ago

>>The case revolves around suspicions that confidants of Netanyahu promoted regulations worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bezeq telecom company in exchange for positive coverage of the prime minister on Bezeq's subsidiary news website, Walla. If true, lifetime ban from politics and 20 years in jail. This is messing with the core of democracy--and by using state /people's money. Those hundreds of millions in "gifts" are a cost to Israeli people.

smsm42 8y ago
Wait, isn't that what every populist politician doing every day - doing something beneficial to an interest group X in exchange for being praised by this interest group and thus raising his chances of being elected again? If a politician recommends a subsidy to the solar industry, knowing he would be positively covered in New York Times and MSNBC, or, alternatively, proposes an increased military budget, knowing Fox News and Rush Limbaugh would praise him for that - is that something that one has to be jailed for? I am afraid if we'd do that then it'd make most sense to just convert the Capitol Hill to a jail, and the same with every state legislature, because everybody there would be jailed anyway.

tracer4201 8y ago

Question for any Israelis- My view of that region has been that in general, Israel is trying to do the right thing, although inidividual actors might attack Palestinian civilians and then get court martial. Palestinian leadership is broken with competing Hamas and Palestinian Authority with open or at least covert support of terrorism. How are Israel’s politics internally? I fear an Israeli leader who is corrupt and doesn’t care for Israeli people or loss of Palestinian civilians could very easily take the Trump path. It would be easy to blame Palestinians for every problem, just as Trump blames Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants (legal or illegal) or some other ethnic group inside Israel to unite the people with electoral power while the leadership gets away with corruption or outright war crimes in the name of defense. This is not meant to be a Israel v. Palestine conversation, but just about Israel’s internal politics. Just want to learn.

golergka 8y ago
Internally it's the same right vs left conflict that you see in many other westernized countries, only magnified by the conflict. But in a very strange and un-hawkish move, after 500 rockets have been fired on Israel in 24 hours, Bibi didn't order any serious retaliation and deescalated instead. Coalition broke down, so now we're up for election on our hands, and Liberman, who resigned in protest against this decision, have seemingly got a lot of points. However, I'm very curious about Bibi, because his main focus for the last few years have been international relations. His frequent visits, and building a lot of ties with muslim and muslim-friendly countries didn't win him a lot support domestically, but it may just be the key to solving the conflict. Especially in this recent situation, there are strong rumours that the main reason he decided not to allow escalation was his desire to demonstrate his reliableness to other middle eastern powers that got tired of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood in general. There's a lot of talk about how corrupt Bibi and his family is; but you have to take it in context, compared to western countries. All Israeli PMs (except for Gold Meir) have always been highly decorated combat military veterans, who have gone into harm's way again and again to serve their country and protect their countrymen. So while it's conceivable that they would give favourable government contracts to their friends and get a couple of millions reached from shady dealings, I don't think that a person with such history wouldn't care for his people.

beagle3 8y ago

Israel has some of the best/worst politicians money can buy - but it is not shy about putting them in jail. A previous PM (Olmert) spent time in jail, as did a previous president (Katzav, this is a ceremonial job, with queen-of-england style responsibilities) and quite a few ministers.

Waterluvian 8y ago
Unfortunately that hints to me that risk of jail doesn't solve the problem.
- keyme 8y ago
  Yup. The current minister of interior has already been in jail once, for offenses committed as the minister of interior (10 years or so ago).
- Joakal 8y ago
  Is recidivism high? If they're all been jailed once, it looks like the jails rehabilitate instead of acting as a deterrent?