Deputy Commissioner Koresh Brenor did not hesitate to confront Benjamin Netanyahu during his investigations. When the Case 2000 investigation began, he asked Netanyahu whether there was a recording of his conversations with Noni Mozes, and let him get tangled up in lies. Later, he told him bluntly that this was “behavior we see among criminals.” Brenor has not been promoted since that investigation, and has now announced his resignation from the police. Deputy Commissioner Eli Assayag led the investigation against Netanyahu in Case 4000. He recruited state witnesses and built the case. Assayag was not promoted and left the police long ago.
It’s not just investigators associated with Netanyahu’s cases. It’s anyone linked to the fight against government corruption. Assaf Wolfish, perhaps the most significant investigator in these cases over the past 10–15 years, left the police. No one fought to keep him. Nor for Tzachi Havkin, another central investigator in these cases.
It was clear to everyone that Brigadier General Yoav Telem was the natural and most suitable candidate to head the Investigations Division. And it was equally clear that there was no chance he would get the job. Indeed, he did not. You can’t blame all the many who have left the police, in the investigations division and in other districts. For them personally, it was the right decision. For the public, it was not.
This is not a time for resignations. This is a time to cling to your chair, absorb the humiliations, endure the lack of promotions, and stay. To stick like a bone in the throat. It’s hard to do this in a hierarchical organization when your superior is someone unfit and inexperienced, appointed only because he flatters the minister. But the mass resignation of senior officers from the police in the past year—many of them among the force’s best (Ami Eshed, Ronen Avnieli, Eyal Azulai)—is making Itamar Ben Gvir’s life easy.
Budget Division head Yogev Gardos at the Finance Ministry, and everyone under him, are right not to budge. They absorb Bezalel Smotrich’s slanders, the exclusion, the irrelevant decisions—and they don’t flinch. That was also our decision at Channel 13 News. The conditions were much easier than in the police, or even at the Finance Ministry—it wasn’t the same difficulty—but had we begun resigning in protest over the CEO’s appointment, the channel’s news company would look very different today.
We must not give up in the battle over the character of the police. In this regard, even statements like “the police have fallen” or “Ben Gvir has completely taken over” only do harm (I myself have written this more than once). They create a perception that trickles down to the very last officer.
Above all, it is both permissible and necessary to expect action from the attorney general and the state prosecutor. They have much on their plates, but this appears to be the most important battle right now, and they are not doing their utmost.
When a protester like Michal Deutsch is arrested 20 times without charges being filed, there is only one way to treat it: these are false arrests, and the voices of Gali Baharav-Miara and Amit Isman need to be heard. When the police mass-arrest hundreds of protesters and keep them overnight for no reason, it cannot pass without a response from the attorney general. A police officer’s authority to arrest must be exercised only with reasonable judgment—and if the judgment is aimed at punishing someone for participating in a protest, it is neither reasonable nor legal.
It is also time to start filing civil lawsuits over false arrests, over violence, over political statements. For now, the courts—in the great majority of cases—treat such arrests as they should: by releasing the protesters. If they respond similarly to compensation lawsuits, perhaps the officers in the field will think not only about pleasing Ben Gvir.