During the seemingly endless cross-examination of Knesset member Moshe Saada in the Ronel Fisher trial, something unbelievable happened. Ten years later, the prosecution discovered a memo that Saada had written a decade earlier and that had been hidden in his office, which had long since been abandoned. The defense lawyers treated it like an atomic bomb. Naturally, they asked to conduct additional searches that would take months. Why not? The passage of time is ultimately killing the trial. In the end, it turned out that the memo's contents were not nearly as threatening to the prosecution as they had seemed. Instead, they showed that no agreement had actually been reached with the state's witness in the case, Eran Malka, until the indictment was filed. It was true that the memo revealed that Saada, then deputy head of the Police Internal Investigations Department, had been in constant dialogue with Malka's lawyers — which was not exactly what the prosecution had initially claimed — but the distance between that and a powerful exculpatory piece of evidence is considerable.
In retrospect, it seems that the Fisher trial was a pilot program for Benjamin Netanyahu's trial. One of Fisher's leading lawyers also works at Amit Hadad's law firm, and presumably told him about the effectiveness of delaying tactics. Focus on procedure, claims of abuse of process, devote little time to confronting the evidence itself and lots of time to questions such as: Where is all the material? Why did you investigate this particular matter? Why didn't you give us additional investigative materials? Why did you discriminate against the defendant?
In the Fisher trial, it worked wonderfully. Saada's cross-examination, for example, lasted more than a year. There is probably no precedent for dozens of hearings devoted to questioning someone who was neither the defendant nor a direct witness to the offenses, but rather a prosecutor who supervised the case. An unprecedented waste of time.
In Netanyahu's trial, it is the same playbook: Why did you investigate without the approval of the Attorney General's office? Why did you pull this stunt? Who authorized it? Why didn't you investigate Isaac Herzog? Less time is devoted to confronting the evidence itself.
The defense lawyers in the Fisher and Netanyahu trials are not the first to discover the weaknesses of Israel's justice system. Criminal trials in Israel, according to a Justice Ministry report also published in Yedioth Ahronoth, take longer than in any other country in the European Union — an average of three years. The evidentiary hearings in billionaire Beny Steinmetz's trial in Switzerland lasted one week.
Unfortunately, at the historic moment in which the liberal camp is fighting a battle for the very character of the state, the person least suited to serve as State Prosecutor is occupying the position. He is not a Bibist, nor does he have ulterior motives, but Amit Isman is simply not suited to the job. Isman tends to promote his associates, dislikes strong and independent people, has failed to genuinely back the prosecution team under attack in the Netanyahu cases, and worst of all, displays cowardice when dealing with sensitive cases.
In the cases involving people who fired shots in Caesarea and those who set fire to trash bins in Jerusalem, Isman backed an astonishingly severe approach toward the defendants. He does not "rein in" the police when they repeatedly arrest protesters without justification, get thrown out of court amid humiliating judicial remarks, and show little enthusiasm for handling the corruption cases brought before him. May Golan has yet to be questioned, the Miri Regev case is heading toward closure, the handling of the Tali Gottlieb case has dragged on endlessly, and the decision to indict Shlomo Filber has been stretched out indefinitely.
The last thing Gali Baharav-Miara needs is a public confrontation with Isman as well. It is no coincidence that the right-wing "poison machine" attacked Liat Ben-Ari and now spends day and night targeting Baharav-Miara, and has recently set its sights on the deputy attorneys general, Sharon Afek and Gil Limon, while Isman enjoys almost complete immunity. When it comes to Isman, even the most ardent Bibists have virtually nothing to complain about.