Netanyahu's files - the testimony of Eyal Gabbai, former CEO of the Prime Minister's Office / Walla!
Senior officials in the economy, in high-tech, in academia, and veterans of the defense establishment petitioned the High Court today (Thursday) demanding that Netanyahu be taken to prison following a "powerful and unusual" conflict of interest surrounding the conduct of the war.
The petition submitted through attorney Dafna Holtz-Lechner demands that Benjamin Netanyahu's term be disqualified As Prime Minister or put him in prison because of the conflict of interest he is in between his responsibility to act in the best interest of the country in the conduct of the war and the use he is making, allegedly, of the war to postpone and delay his criminal trial in the Alif cases.
Among the petitioners, who belong to the "Fortress of Democracy" group, are the founders of Ormat and the winners of the Israel Prize for Industry, Yehuda and Dita Brunitsky; high-tech entrepreneurs and investors Dov Moran, Yanki Margalit and Yuval Ravavi; Major General (resp.) Nimrod Shafer, Brigadier General (resp.) Haim Gofan and Brigadier General (resp.) Ofer Lapidot; The winner of the Israel Prize, Prof. David Harel, and professors Rivka Carmi, Menachem Magidor, Frances Redai, Ehud Shapira, and more.
This is the first petition to the High Court seeking to disqualify Netanyahu not because he violated the conflict of interest arrangement drawn up for him by the legal counsel to the government, but because of the fact that Netanyahu has an inherent conflict of interest between his public role and his criminal trial. Based on protocols from the Jerusalem District Court, where his criminal trial is being conducted of Netanyahu, the petitioners claim that the prime minister has used several times since the outbreak of the war his preoccupation with its management as a justification for submitting requests for postponements and delays in his trial.
Netanyahu. "Without the public's trust in the person who heads the government and is responsible for making the decisions in the war, our ability to win the war is weakened"/Photo processing, screenshot: News 13
According to the petitioners, this necessitates ordering Netanyahu's disqualification from office or his removal to the fortress. This, in light of the ruling of the Supreme Court on the issue of conflict of interest, according to which a reasonable fear of a conflict of interest is enough to disqualify one from office. The petitioners also rely on an opinion submitted in the past by the legal advisor to the government, which reflects the ruling of the Supreme Court on the subject and which states in principle that if it is not possible to prevent a conflict of interest on the part of a public official through a conflict of interest settlement (of the type that currently prohibits Netanyahu from engaging in the judicial system ), the way to deal with the conflict of interests is to disqualify the priesthood. The petitioners agree that a conflict of interest settlement cannot be applied to Netanyahu that would prevent him from engaging in war, and therefore, according to them, he should be disqualified from office.
The petition states, among other things, that "as the prime minister who heads the war cabinet, the authority is given to control and determine the 'height of the flames' in the war, that is, to make decisions regarding the degree of intensity of the fighting, the duration until its end, the breadth of its deployment across additional arenas, as well as any other decision, which directly and immediately influences the intensity of the ongoing criminal proceedings in his case. In this way, (Netanyahu) gains significant control over the length of the proceedings, the extent of its spread, the pace of the hearing of the witnesses as part of it and the frequency of the hearings
. Structured, powerful, unusual and intractable matters, between his being a defendant facing criminal trial and his tenure as prime minister while waging war, in a way that cannot be prevented and hedged in any way. Under these circumstances, there is no escape and it is in the public interest to order the disqualification of his tenure in his high public office.
"Without the public's trust in the person who stands at the head of the government and is responsible for making decisions in the war, in the purity of his considerations and the fact that the one and only interest that stands before his eyes when making the fateful decisions for the future of every citizen and every soldier in the country and the future of the country as a whole, is the public interest and there is no end to it - public resilience is severely damaged and the ability of Society will fight for its defense, continue to maintain its security, send its soldiers to the battlefield and win the war."
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