Mandelblit, who is supposed to represent the government, has joined petitioners against it demanding the appointment of a commissioner. Prosecution • Interpretation
Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced today (Thursday) that he is joining a petition demanding the issuance of a conditional order that would require the government to appoint a permanent police commissioner.
This is not the first time the adviser has chosen instead of advising the government to join the opposite side.
Mandelblit: "The attacks on me will not deter me" // Archive photo: Moshe Ben Simhon
Last week, the Adviser to the Movement for the Purification of the Movement joined the High Court for the appointment of the Director General of the Ministry of Justice, and demanded that the High Court issue a conditional order requiring the government to approve the appointment. Which was indeed issued) on the issue of a conflict of interest settlement against Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The meaning of things cannot be overstated.
These are the state's responses to the High Court, no less.
This is related to an age-old battle between a classic democratic agenda that holds the people as the sovereign and elects representatives of the executive and the legislature and that promotes its policies according to the will of the public, and a post-democratic agenda and I will say anti-democratic, which makes the sovereign and claims the sovereign. The people but the clerks, the court, the prosecution or its head.
In recent years something interesting has happened.
The consultant stopped advising and became an executive figure.
Not as someone who legally advises the government to enable it to carry out its policy but as someone who decides, in effect, on the policy itself and sometimes even acts against it when it joins the petitioners.
The boundaries have blurred.
Imagine a situation where a company takes the services of a large law firm in order to be faithfully represented in court.
The owner of the firm goes through the lawsuit file, falls in love with it, identifies with the petitioners and joins the other party in court while leaving the company unrepresented and continuing to receive payment from it.
But here the situation is even worse.
This is not just an ethical and moral violation of the society that is governed here by the state, but a fatal violation of democracy.
In Zion, he rose to the rank of officials not elected by the public, who are supposed to serve the executive elected by the sovereign - who is the public and simply carries out a government coup.
On this subject, the sincere words of Deputy Attorney General Dina Zilber in her book "Bureaucracy as Politics" in which she wrote that "it is important that the bureaucracy recognizes its power to formulate policy on cardinal issues.
The important trend is the relocation of the center of governmental power and the ability to make practical decisions on questions of policy, from the elected political echelon to the official bureaucracy.
"These processes take place under the guise of neutrality and objective expertise, while circumventing the democratic process and its risks, without giving an account to the general public whose fate has been determined at the bureaucratic level."
Zilber, who had been reprimanded in the past for being a civil servant criticizing the elected political echelon, stepped up to do so in her last speech when she called the prime minister and interior minister (without mentioning their names) "the pike leader and villain."
And perhaps it is also time to wonder about the role of the counsel, who is in one hat as the chief prosecutor who puts all his prestige and status on the indictments against the prime minister, and in the other hat as the counsel of the accused and the government headed by him.
A role that entails a built-in conflict of interest.
In many Western countries there is a separation between these roles and perhaps it is time to fulfill them here as well.
