The Israeli Knesset has voted 46-36 in favor of a new bill dubbed the “Netanyahu Law,” which aims to retroactively protect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from two different ongoing investigations into corruption.
Technically the bill would protect all elected officials from such investigations, though Netanyahu is clearly the most obvious and primary beneficiary. The bill intends to forbid police from recommending charges be brought in their investigations.
Under the law, which still has to survive additional readings in the Knesset, police involved in investigations are effectively gagged from confirming if a crime was committed by a public official. Conceivably an Attorney General is still allowed to solicit such an assessment from the police, but it has to be totally secret, and what he does with such a recommendation is up to him.
Even in these rare occasions when a recommendation is offered, it must remain secret under this new law, threatening a one-year jail term for anyone who leaks the result of investigations to the press.
Netanyahu allies are the sponsors of the bill, saying it is needed to protect the reputation of suspects. David Bitan, one of the coalition heads, added that “the public doesn’t need to know everything.”
LOL. What an exemplary democracy, the only one in the middle east by golly!!! Surely that moves deserves a billion-dollar gift from the US taxpayer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the US Congress doesn’t consider something similar to protect themselves – but not Trumpo, youbetcha.
It is a sad and bitter irony indeed that perhaps the most dangerous, vicious, evil and vile criminal leader in the Middle East wasn’t from Iraq, or Libya, but in fact from Israel. Clearly so much of the violence and hatred and terrorism is a direct result of the crimes and atrocities committed by Israel. It would have been far better to have removed the nuclear weapons from Israel in 2001 and forced Israel back to the Pre1967 borders as mandated by international law instead of destroying 2/3’s of the entire Middle East killing millions, turning 10’s of millions into refugees, reducing entire cities to rubble, spending more than 7 Trillion dollars. The world in general and America in particular would have become a far better place than it is today.
There can be no doubt regarding of the illegitimacy and sheer mendacity of the illegal Zionist occupiers destroying Palestine. Netanyahu has been the ultimate heretic, and purveyor of terror. Israel is what it has always been…
Israel was attacked, so the occupation is legal.
Wrong.
It was Israel itself that invoked the international law of occupation in 1967. Having invoked that law, it is bound by it. The Israeli High Court of Justice and the Supreme Court of Israel have, multiple times, specifically situated Israeli authority over e.g. the West Bank in the Hague Conventions’ rules on military occupations.
Israeli annexation of, or settlement of its own population in, the occupied territories is illegal under international law that Israel has recognized and that Israel invokes left and right — when invoking it is convenient for them.
Totally expected.