Yotan Eyalis a lawyer who heads the Legal Forum for Israel.
Last week, the Physicians for Human Rights organization filed a petition with the Supreme Court demanding that the army not conduct any military operations in the Kamal Adwan hospital in the Gaza Strip. Less than 24 hours later, 250 terrorists who had been hiding in the hospital and who had launched attacks against IDF forces from there, surrendered. Fortunately, the petition was ruled on by a conservative judge who was on duty and who did not immediately issue an interim order, and not by an activist judge like Acting Supreme Court President Amit, who declared in another hearing not long ago that the court is at the disposal of extreme left-wing organizations.
Recently, many accusations have been made against right-wingers, claiming that those who oppose a State Commission of Inquiry of the events connected to October 7th do not want a commission of inquiry at all and are only trying to gloss over the facts. Let's put aside for a moment the lie that the majority of the public supports such a commission, which we will return to later, and address the claim against the opponents of the State Commission of Inquiry.
In Israel, a State Commission of Inquiry is appointed by the President of the Supreme Court, it is the President of the Supreme Court who determines its composition and the chairman of the committee is a judge or a retired judge. In Israel, at least half of the public does not trust the judicial system, and in the case of a State Commission of Inquiry, does not trust that the President of the Supreme Court will appoint members of an investigative commission who will truly examine the failures that led to the difficult events of October 7th, failures for which the judicial system also bears responsibility.
Because of the above, the demand has arisen not to establish a "state" investigative commission appointed by the Supreme Court President or, in our case, the acting Supreme Court President, whose attitude towards the government is not particularly friendly, to say the least, but instead to establish other committees whose makeup is presently not defined by law.
For example, a bill has been proposed to establish an investigative commission that will be composed of opposition and coalition members, a proposal that in the opinion of the Legal Forum is not good because there is still a strong possibility that political biases will influence the investigation. However, it is a good sign that there is a desire to think outside the box and think of solutions that will lead to a proper and honest inquiry.
Despite the suggestions to think outside the box, the extreme left insists again and again that there can be no other solution than a State Commission of Inquiry appointed by the President of the Supreme Court, and publishes biased polls that show that the majority of the public wants it.
Why do we claim that the polls are biased? In a survey that was published, over 70 percent of the public answered that they are in favor of a State Investigation Committee. However, when you examine the wording of the survey, you see that only two options are presented: a State Investigation Committee or a committee appointed by politicians. The wording of the question does not explain what a State Investigation Committee is, and the other option presented was the option of politicians who are viewed by many as being biased and interested in a cover-up.
And the reason that we claim that people did not understand what a State Investigation Committee is, is that in the same survey, the following question appeared: How many are willing to have the members of the State Investigation Committee appointed by the Supreme Court President? The answer to that was less than 50 percent! This shows that many people do not understand how a State Investigation Committee is formed or how it operates, for it is the Supreme Court president, or acting President, who appoints the members of a State Investigation Committee.
But why does the extreme left insist only accepting an investigation committee run by the judicial system and are not willing to accept any other solution? To understand this, you have to go back a few years.
In 2004, The Legal Forum discovered a program, which was reviewed in an article published in Haaretz, about the radical left New Israel Fund's “Lawyers’ Program”, a program that for decades, until 2018, quietly placed people in senior positions in the judicial system. The article described how promising lawyers in the public service were chosen, sent abroad to study "human rights law" at the fund's expense, including living expenses, and in return undertook to volunteer for a year in one of the New Israel Fund's organizations, organizations such as Adalah, the Association for Civil Rights, and the above mentioned "Physicians for Human Rights".
After that, those lawyers entered the public sector and the judicial system and promoted the agendas of the New Israel Fund’s supported organizations. For many years, the general public in Israel did not understand how these organizations work to influence policy from within the public sector. With regard to the judicial system, while the ordinary citizen thinks that the legal system promotes justice, these lawyers, who had been funded by the New Israel Fund, actually introduced anti-Israeli agendas into the judicial system, agendas that, for example, seek to protect terrorists who barricade themselves inside a hospital and allow them to act against our soldiers and the State of Israel.
And so, a situation was created whereby an attorney from the New Israel Fund's “Lawyers’ Program” would petition on behalf of an organization, an attorney from the same program could be in the role of representing the state, and a judge from the program could be the judge in the case and rule in favor of the petitioner. This was how an anti-Israel agenda was introduced into the judicial system without the ordinary citizen and even many members of Knesset noticing, and this was how the system was infiltrated and began to influence the State of Israel to act against itself.
Once the anti-Israel agenda of the judicial system became clear, the public, without knowing how it happened but seeing the court's decisions, began to lose trust in the judiciary. It should be noted that the New Israel Fund's “Lawyers’ Program” was not the only program that introduced negative elements into the judicial system.
Recently, every time someone expresses distrust in the legal system, they are accused of being part of a poison machine aimed at damaging trust in the judicial system. This is an attempt to stifle any criticism of the system and important and genuine criticism is portrayed as stupidity or as funded criticism. The truth is that public trust in the legal system has declined because the system is simply not trustworthy, because it is a system that has chosen to introduce political agendas into itself, a system that does not work for justice but for turning Israel into an anti-Zionist state - a system that prioritizes dealing with the conditions of terrorists over all other issues, and this more than anything else testifies to its values.
The lack of trust in the judicial system and therefore the lack of trust that such a system will be able to appoint a non-biased investigative committee is not because of a poison machine but because the system has gone astray, it is because of organizations that for years have worked to influence the legal system from within and encouraged it to take unlimited power into its own hands and act against public values.
How could a committee connected to the judicial system as it is today truly investigate the role of the judiciary in the failures that let to October 7th?
The spokeswoman for the judiciary, who this week published a condemnation of a campaign against the Supreme Court, can repeatedly publish condemnations against those who criticize it, but the truth is simple: until the judicial system becomes a just system that does not promote anti-Zionist values, trust in it will not increase, and those of us who really want a commission of inquiry that will examine all the failures that led to October 7th and will not cover up the involvement of those close to it, are not willing to put our trust in an investigative committee run by the judicial system.
The Legal Forum for Israel continues to expose problems within the judicial system and, through education, proposed laws and amendments to existing laws, works towards making the Israeli judicial system one devoted to justice and to the definition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.