The following article was written by Attorney Avichai Yehosef, who was involved in preparing the defense cases for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of his work at the law firm of Amit Hadad, in cases 1,000 and 2,000. It is a telling indictment of the attempts to make a coup in Israel even during the current war.
None of us wants to imagine that a coup could ever happen in Israel. We are so unprepared to believe it that when such a coup actually takes place – we refuse to see it.
According to my legal and civic understanding, over the past year, a coup has been occurring in Israel – backed by the military, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), the prosecution, the Supreme Court, the legal advisor to the government, and parts of the media. Anyone who does not notice this brutal coup unfolding before their eyes is either uninformed about the news or does not understand the matter in depth.
In my opinion, attempts at a coup began years ago in the halls of the prosecution and the legal advisor’s office, with the framing of criminal charges against Netanyahu aimed at ousting him.
Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of shekels from taxpayer money were invested in this effort. Massive investigative teams were formed, special means were employed that had never been used against citizens who are not members of criminal or terrorist organizations, and selective enforcement and gross violations of almost all fundamental laws in Israel were carried out.
After this covert coup failed or was delayed too long, (Netanyahu, unlike his predecessors, simply refused to resign after the indictments against him, and was even re-elected as prime minister in general elections), the overt coup began.
In the year leading up to the October 7 disaster, four additional forces began to act against Netanyahu, besides the prosecution and the legal advisor’s office.
Thousands of protesters, whose slogan was “defending democracy,” decided to block roads and harass elected officials over a minor change in the law that no one remembers today (the reasonability standard). Former military and intelligence officers published detailed petitions, signed by hundreds of reserve officers, including top generals from the Shin Bet and Mossad, and hundreds of pilots, which included threats of refusal and rebellion.
Parts of the media joined this effort, starting to highlight the significant threat to democracy posed by the reform they called “the judicial coup” – a deeply ironic term.
The legal advisor to the government entered the fray, permitting disruptions of order that had never been allowed by law or ruling (“there is no effective protest without disrupting order”). The judiciary joined her by releasing protesters wholesale, including the most violent ones.
The spyware scandal was exposed, initially getting media attention when it was revealed that the police and the prosecution conducted searches on the phones and email accounts of hundreds of citizens without search warrants. However, the case was quickly silenced and covered up by a commission of inquiry hastily set up by the legal advisor’s office, which concluded that nothing unusual had occurred.
The media reported that some of the spyware was installed on people close to the prime minister. All these actions were carried out without prior search warrants.
The flawed investigation in the “thousands” cases, which demonstrated highly selective enforcement, included the unprecedented use of detention and coercion as investigative tools, all aimed at a systematic fishing expedition for evidence against the prime minister. On the other hand, Netanyahu was charged with experimental charges – charges that had never been brought against anyone in Israel.
In recent years, there has been significant criticism of the use of administrative detention as an investigative tool by the Israeli police, and the law on this matter has undergone a revolution. This revolution was entirely trampled in the “thousands” cases [bribery cases of Netanyahu], where arrests became a mass tool for investigation, even when the suspicions did not justify detention, and this was done to coerce Netanyahu’s associates into revealing evidence of unknown criminal conduct, which is in fact illegal (it is forbidden to arrest someone without a founded criminal suspicion, just to extract secrets they know about others).
It is no wonder that the “thousands” cases collapsed one after another after state witnesses contradicted the statements they had been coerced into making under duress and threats.
The next stage in Netanyahu’s removal came with the involvement of parts of the IDF, or at least senior reserve officers. The tragedy of October 7, and the harsh reality that followed, made many forget how tense and volatile the atmosphere in Israel had been in the year leading up to the vicious attack. Every week, it seemed to anyone consuming the media that the country was on the brink of civil war. The climax came with Netanyahu’s first attempt to fire Defense Minister Gallant.
With the announcement of the firing, clear threats from the security branches emerged, saying that this would not be allowed, and calls for protest and disobedience to government orders escalated, with the main threat quoted frequently in the media being that if a conflict arose between the government and the judiciary, the security and intelligence branches would obey the court’s decisions.
It is unclear what threats were made behind closed doors, but Netanyahu quickly reversed his decision to fire Gallant.
Some estimate that the toxic relationship between the security and intelligence branches and the prime minister contributed to Israel’s delayed response to the October 7 attack. I do not want to sound decisive about things that are not clear to me, but I am certain that such a hypothesis is not unfounded, especially in light of Netanyahu’s insistence that no one had warned him about the threat when the attack started, until it actually began.
And even after the horrific attack, the worst and most tragic day in Israel’s brief history, the efforts to remove Netanyahu, in violation of the law, continued.
We are witnessing the final stages of this anti-democratic attempt right now. The legal advisor to the government is making tremendous efforts to force the government to fire her. She publishes daily objections to every government initiative, interferes with appointments that are not under her authority (for example, in the police), and continues her refusal to represent the government in petitions filed against it, with her main weapon being the threat of declaring the prime minister incapacitated.
When these measures did not succeed, the judiciary decided to summon the prime minister for intensive testimony in court for two full days every week in the coming months, with the goal of forcing him into voluntary or forced incapacitation.
Even when the prime minister, who is currently managing a war on multiple fronts, asked the court for leniency, by requesting to testify one day a week rather than two – he was denied. This is an unprecedented step, not even taken in the most serious criminal cases, with defendants whose country’s fate does not rest on their shoulders.
Additionally, immediately after Netanyahu’s intention to fire Gallant was once again made public, a wave of arrests began within Netanyahu’s close circle, and the Feldstein case exploded.
It later became clear that Feldstein and the officer who provided him with the information were placed under conditions of detention similar to those for terrorist operatives – all for one purpose: to incriminate Netanyahu.
It turns out that unlawful investigative methods are not considered unlawful when attempting to oust Netanyahu. Unfortunately, there is no better example than the investigation of Nir Hefetz, on whom physical and psychological pressure was applied, including sleep and medical care deprivation, as well as threats to his family. Furthermore, an “interrogation maneuver” was carried out in which a woman close to him, unrelated to the case, was summoned to increase the pressure on him.
Meanwhile, the prosecution found itself without an executing arm, after Ben-Gvir threatened to take control of the senior police command. Therefore, in a precedent-setting step, the arrests in the Feldstein case were carried out by the Shin Bet.
In order to remove Ben-Gvir, who was undermining efforts to oust Netanyahu, the legal advisor called on Netanyahu to fire him from the government – even though no indictment had been filed against him.
A few days later, the prosecution activated its Police Investigation Department, which is under its authority, to arrest the head of the Judea and Samaria police district and the commissioner of the Israel Prison Service – allegedly for leaking information to Ben-Gvir and for acceding to his requests not to arrest far-right activists.
Even as a citizen who identifies with the liberal left in Israel, like myself, if I am true to myself, I must admit that these forceful measures are unprecedented in a democratic country.
And I haven’t even mentioned the efforts of the Supreme Court to appoint a president contrary to the will of the Minister of Justice, and to drag the government into establishing a state commission of inquiry where the Supreme Court would appoint its members.
In conclusion: Almost every week, we witness a new affair in which the branches of law and government act in direct opposition to every ruling and every Basic Law passed over the years in Israel. In the past, similar actions were investigated by commissions of inquiry that issued decisive conclusions, often leading to heads rolling. Today, we don’t even know where to start, given the many scandals and improper behaviors that emerge before us daily.
In conclusion, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a coup in Israel is not only a possible scenario – it is something that is actually happening right now, right under our noses – and we, sadly, are not doing enough to stop it in time.
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