After police interrogation, coalition chair said to mull quitting

Coalition chairman David Bitan has reportedly told confidants that he is considering quitting the Knesset, after police grilled him for over 12 hours Sunday on suspicion of receiving bribes, fraud, money laundering, and breach of trust.

“For a long time, they have not stopped chasing me. They bully me. They do not let me work. When they could not find a speck in my work, they moved onto my family. Leave them alone. I’m sick of this mess,” Bitan told confidants, according to a report in Hadashot TV news.

“I am considering resigning from the Knesset. The police are doing everything they can to piece together a case against me because I’m fighting them,” he was quoted as saying.

Bitan’s interrogation on Sunday came as the coalition chairman was working to gather support ahead of a final vote on legislation that would forbid police from issuing recommendations for indictment in corruption investigations against public figures.

However, Israel Police spokeswoman Merav Lapidot indicated the timing of Bitan’s summoning at the Lahav 433 national crime unit was a coincidence.

“There is no connection [between the probe into Bitan] and any political or other events that occur parallel to the investigation,” Lapidot told Channel 10. “The date [for the interrogation] was set long in advance. If we’d act according to political developments, we would pollute the investigation.”

The Likud party lawmaker, a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is suspected of having taken bribes from crime organizations in Rishon Lezion after he became the deputy mayor of the city in 2015, and of diverting a tender toward the son of an acquaintance in return for money.

The questioning came hours after 17 Rishon Lezion city officials — among them Mayor Dov Zur — were arrested as part of a widening corruption probe into suspected bribe-taking.

Several coalition lawmakers, including prominent defenders of Netanyahu, cried foul over the timing of the revelation of a year-long graft probe surrounding Bitan.

Likud MK David Amsalem, the original author of the bill, slammed the police announcement as an attempt to topple Netanyahu.

“What’s happening here is very grave,” Amsalem said Sunday. “There’s a vast army that includes the entire political system and media, which is trying to topple Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israel Police must investigate every complaint and every [suspicion] it finds, but couldn’t Bitan have been questioned in two days? Someone is trying to torpedo this legislation.”

Environmental Protection Minister Ze’ev Elkin also commented on the timing, telling Army Radio in a Sunday morning interview, “I was very surprised by the way the story developed this morning. The timing, the look of the thing, is very problematic.”

The legislation Bitan had been pressing to pass hit a snag later Sunday after lawmakers from both sides of the aisle raised objections. A scheduled Monday Knesset Internal Affairs Committee meeting, in which MKs were expected to finalize the so-called police recommendations bill, was canceled after Netanyahu asked Likud lawmakers to redraft the controversial bill so that it would exclude the investigations against him. The implication was that it will not come to a plenum vote later Monday as initially planned.

“The recommendations law is a good law. It protects human dignity,” Netanyahu insisted in a Facebook post on Sunday afternoon.

The bill “clarifies the distinction in a democracy between the role of the police and the role of the legal echelons,” Netanyahu argued. “Legal officials are the only ones authorized to decide whether to indict someone. This law would prevent publicizing the police’s recommendations, something that happens regularly and casts a pall of suspicion on innocent people.”

Yet the bill has “been turned into a political bludgeon against the elected government,” he went on. “In order to ensure that the debate is substantive, and won’t be subverted for political propaganda, I’ve asked [the bill’s author] MK Amsalem to ensure that its wording will not apply to the investigation underway into my affairs.”

The bill has faced multiple obstacles.

The Knesset Internal Affairs Committee met Sunday for a marathon session to consider a spate of opposition objections to the latest draft of the bill, the most significant being Kulanu MK Merav Ben-Ari’s amendment delaying its implementation for three months, in order to give police time to conclude their investigations of Netanyahu without the appearance that the bill was meant to hide their findings from the public.

In principle, the bill can be delayed indefinitely by the filing of hundreds of objections by opposition lawmakers. The fact that the first such objection came from Ben-Ari, a coalition MK, highlights the difficulty Likud lawmakers would face had they not removed the bill from Monday’s agenda.

The legislative maneuvering came after a large anti-corruption rally in Tel Aviv Saturday night calling on Netanyahu to resign. It was one of the largest demonstrations yet against Netanyahu’s lengthy rule.

For her part, police spokesperson Lapidot insisted that the probe into Bitan had to continue as planned. “The right thing to do is to stick to the investigation, stick to our truth and our striving for justice, regardless of what is happening outside.”