The Deep State – Part IV (Although each article stands alone, we recommend clicking these links for part I, part II and part III)
Today we will discuss three individuals, Pelia Albeck, Talia Sasson and Dina Zilber. The details of the stories surrounding these individuals are crucial, crucial because they give us a basis for understanding how the deep state uses the law to its advantage by applying double standards. Sometimes it is strict and will stringently apply or even misapply the letter of the law, sometimes it is lenient and things can be forgiven.
We will see that this is done according to the political purpose and context, and with intent. Using selective “application of the law,” the deep state removes people it does not want from their positions, and allows other people to take their place. Civil servants in most senior positions can be removed, using tactics reminiscent of Beria’s infamous Soviet boast, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” invariably under cover of the law claiming “no extraneous motives.”
Pelia Albeck
For many years, the State of Israel developed new communities, or in literal Hebrew translation "settlements" (based on a biblical term), in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Building such communities is much than a commitment to building Israel or just inviting people to live somewhere new, it involves infrastructure such as water, electricity, roads and sewage, and everything involves permission and permits, which in turn requires significant legal support. This was not done in secret, as most of these communities were promoted by successive Israeli governments, statistically, more by left-wing governments. Here we meet Pelia Albeck.
Albeck was a highly respected lawyer who served as Deputy State Attorney and Head of the Civil Department at the State Attorney's Office, a very senior position she held for 24 years. Albeck managed the new communities sector in Judea and Samaria at the State Attorney's Office and was in fact responsible for the entire legal field on the subject. She believed that the state had the authority to declare unowned lands to be “state lands”, consistent with the prior 400 years of Ottoman law, British mandatory law and the more recent Jordanian law applied from 1948 to 1967. In the absence of ownership, all lands belong to the state, the state has the authority to decide the disposition of such land and allow people, Jews included, to live on them.
Albeck's view was openly sympathetic to Jewish settlement of the land, and although left wing governments supported such settlement, leftist individuals were less likely to agree with her approach on the subject.
In 1993, Haim Oron from the leftist Meretz party proposed a law that the state, and not the terrorist, compensate victims of Jewish terrorism (rather than having the individual terrorist compensate, as the act was not against the state). In a closed meeting within the Attorney General's Office, Albeck expressed her opinion against this proposal and criticized the motive of Oron. There is a law in Israel that civil servants are not allowed to publicly criticize an elected official. Though the meeting was a closed meeting, someone leaked Albeck’s opinion to the public. Her comments in the meeting were deemed to be criticism, Oron was an elected official, so it was an open and shut case, Albeck was fired from her job on the grounds that as a civil servant she was legally prohibited from criticizing elected officials.
Talia Sasson
Talia Sasson is another attorney who rose through the ranks of the prosecutor's office. She became the head of the Department for Senior Positions in the prosecutor's office and worked there for 25 years. In 1994, a few months after Pelia Albeck was dismissed, Attorney General Michael Ben Yair (who we mentioned in Part 2 of this series in the context of fabricating a case against Justice Minister Yaakov Ne'eman because Ne’eman told Ben Yair he was going to fire him) issued a secret order authorizing administrative arrests, serious indictments for minor offenses, and other abuses of authority, to be applied against the Jewish residents of communities (:settlements:) in Judea and Samaria.
When exposed in 1998, this order was deemed draconian and illegal with no basis in Israeli law and illegally applied to one group of Israeli citizens (only residents of Judea and Samaria) and not to the rest of the citizens of Israel.
In 1995, Talia Sasson was appointed by Michael Ben Yair to head a secret team whose goal was to coordinate law enforcement activities against Jews in Judea and Samaria based on these draconian procedures. The team, eponymously named the Shai Nitzan team named after its leader when it was exposed in 1998, enforced Ben Yair and Talia Sasson’s decrees in secrecy for 3 years. While the team’s activities were finally suspended after its exposure and it received severe public criticism for its illegal conduct, the shadow it left is still felt today. Notably, even when it was exposed for what was deemed to be illegal activities and biased application of “law” against the residents of Judea and Samaria, neither Ben Yair nor Sasson were dismissed.
In fact, despite her obvious biases, in 2003 Talia Sasson was appointed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to prepare a report on the legal status of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria! Talia Sasson issued a report that she called the Illegal Outposts Report, defining settlement in Judea and Samaria to be totally illegal and determining that entire communities should be destroyed.
The severe impact of the report is difficult to describe, it introduced and normalized the concept of "illegal outposts" and replaced the term “settlements” with a new term, "illegal outposts". The report further determined that communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal and should be destroyed.
Sasson’s report became the nexus of every internal and external effort to remove Israel from Judea and Samaria to this day, justifying a worldwide hostility to the idea that Jews can live in Judea and Samaria, the origin and very heartland of Jewish existence, and a resulting loss of support within the Israeli government for the entire settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria, for construction freezes and demolished Jewish communities.
In 2009, Talia Sasson retired from the State Attorney's Office and was immediately appointed as Chairman of the International Council of the New Israel Fund - the same fund with an extremist agenda, mentioned in a previous article, that worked very hard to bring lawyers on its behalf into the state service. She later served as president of the New Israel Fund, she became a member of the extreme left-wing organization "Yesh Din" and described the settlements as "the cancer of the state."
It should be noted that Michael Ben Yair, the former attorney general who issued the draconian regulation, who appointed Talia Sasson to head the enforcement team and who served as attorney general at the time of Pelia Albeck's dismissal, later joined the New Israel Fund, similar to Talia Sasson, served on the Public Counsel of the New Israel Fund and joined B'Tselem, another extreme leftist organization. He called Israel an apartheid state.
The extreme gap between the legal worldviews of Pelia Albeck and Talia Sasson towards Judea and Samaria, was and is clear to all. The issuance of the illegal and draconian procedures against the residents of Judea and Samaria could not have been kept secret if Albeck had still been in her position at the State Attorney's Office. The proximity between the strange dismissal of Pelia Albeck, as the result of an internal leak from a closed, unpublicized meeting, to and the appointment of Talia Sasson, who views Judea and Samaria as a "cancer," raise serious questions about whether there was not a deliberate hand behind the matter.
Dina Zilber
Another civil servant we should examine is attorney Dina Zilber, former Deputy Attorney General, one of the most senior positions in the Israeli legal system. The job of the Attorney General is to advise and represent the government, supervising the administration of the law. The AG’s deputy is second in line, representing the law. Aside from the law proscribing criticizing the government, to do so is in direct contradiction of the job description.
Regardless, in 2017, Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein retired from the bench and a public conference was held in his honour that was broadcast and filmed. Zilber spoke at the conference criticizing the Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked. She was not dismissed or even reprimanded for her very public criticism, the Attorney General simply ordered her to stop criticizing the government. Which she did not do.
Repeatedly, in 2018, she criticized the government time and again in discussions in Knesset committees and promoted her own agendas instead of representing the government*. Once again, the Attorney General "reprimanded her" and even ruled that her “statement significantly exceeded the scope of expression appropriate for a legal advisor in the public service."
But he did not fire her and even ruled that she would continue to represent him in the Knesset. Again in 2020, about a month before she retired from office, she spoke at a conference and accused the government of "fake leadership". Once again, there were no repercussions and she completed her term of office “with honor”.
It is impossible not to notice the vast difference between the system's conduct towards someone who is favored and someone who is not. Contrasting the case of Pelia Albeck, who was fired for criticizing a member of Knesset in a private meeting that was leaked and the case of Dina Zilber who repeatedly publicly criticized members of the government and was not fired but was promoted, giving her additional authority and the position of legal advisor to Knesset committees.
And Zilber is not the only senior lawyer who has criticized the government or Members of the Knesset. Supreme Court justices, legal advisors and senior attorneys have all repeatedly and publicly criticized Members of the Knesset and the government in violation of the law, but the law is not enforced unless it suits an agenda.
Albeck is just one example of someone who interferes with the draconian enforcement against the settlers of Judea and Samaria, in Part 1 we saw the disqualification of whole parties from Knesset elections and in Part 2 we saw the manipulation of ministerial appointments and the the arrest of Commander Avishai Muallem among other malfeasance. As the ideological foundation of these strategies is so consistent and obstructive we will need to return to the source of it in a later article.
The second thing that is important to mention in Zilber's case is not directly related to Pelia Albeck, but it provides us with a rare glimpse into the conduct of the deep state. In 2017, when Zilber was Deputy Attorney General, she published a 26-page article called: "My Eyes Saw Many Beautiful Things": The High Courts Department as a Legal Education Hub. (see www.TZCNews.com for the full report in Hebrew) In this article, Zilber, who previously headed the High Courts Department in the State Attorney's Office, explained step by step how the High Courts Department actually represents the positions of the attorneys in it, who force the government to conform to their opinions as opposed to representing the government's opinion.
In it she explained that in order to advance within the department, one must align oneself with the agenda of the heads of the department, how the young attorneys in the department are "educated" in this way, and how those who do not understand this simply do not advance. As she wrote, "The article demonstrates how the format of the routine, practical departmental work preserves the departmental ethos for years, how the sometimes confrontational interaction with the political echelon and with fellow professional supervisors affects the ethos and its strength."
Continuity and power despite election results, to all extent nullifying the will of the people.