AG warns against ‘quotas’ for arrests, prosecution of anti-overhaul protesters

A week after Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and other Justice Ministry officials were summoned to the weekly cabinet meeting hosted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and castigated at length over authorities’ handling of lawbreaking during anti-government demonstrations, her office reportedly filed a professional opinion that warned against trying to set any quotas for arrests or criminal prosecution of protesters.

Avital Sompolinsky, deputy attorney general of constitutional affairs, filed the document giving the opinion of Baharav-Miara’s office with the government’s cabinet secretary Yossi Fuchs on Sunday, according to a report (Hebrew link) in Haaretz.

The opinion was in response to complaints heard during the cabinet meeting last week that law enforcement authorities were handling the protesters with kid gloves. Several calls were made for Baharav-Miara’s dismissal during the meeting.

Senior coalition figures have increasingly urged police and the legal system to deal more forcefully with the demonstrators.

A number of ministers, chief among them National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, have complained that police should be making more arrests and that, in some cases, protesters needed to be indicted.

The massive wave of protests against the hardline Netanyahu government’s efforts to overhaul the judiciary has widely included rallying outside coalition ministers’ homes, blocking highways, disrupting airport operations, and other forms of civil disobedience.

Ministers have bristled at what they view as overly soft handling of demonstrators who harass and heckle them wherever they go, stage protests at their homes and block key roads for hours at a time.

Law enforcement authorities, wrote Sompolinsky, “cannot set some numerical benchmark for the use of means to disperse demonstrations, for arrests, for indictments, and the like. A priori assumption that the law enforcement system must comply with ‘quotas’ will severely impair the value of equality before the law.”

Existing instructions and protocols for the complexities of dealing with demonstrations “result from the enormous importance of freedom of expression and the right to demonstrate in a democratic system, and the understanding that [allowing protests to take place] requires a constant balance between conflicting rights and interests,” she wrote, according to the Haaretz report.

Sompolinsky said that “quantitative examination alone cannot form the basis for comparison” on law enforcement responses.

The protests entered their 28th consecutive week on Saturday with hundreds of thousands amassing in Tel Aviv and other locations for the weekly demonstrations, as political tensions ratchet up with the coalition moving ahead with legislation to weaken the courts’ powers starting with the “reasonableness bill.”

According to numbers presented during the cabinet meeting last week, police have detained close to 600 protesters since the anti-government demonstrations began in January. These arrests have been for disturbing the peace, not obeying police instructions or assaulting police officers. Of those cases, six indictments were filed, all for allegedly attacking police officers.

At the meeting, Ben Gvir, who has authority over the police as national security minister, demanded to know how many protesters had been indicted, and “how many were investigated on suspicion of criminal conspiracy for organizing riots?” When he was told that the answers were six and zero respectively, he reportedly exploded, declaring, “It’s simply a disgrace. There is no enforcement.”

At the meeting, during which ministers made repeated calls for her dismissal and Netanyahu and others railed against “selective enforcement,” Baharav-Miara responded by implicitly accusing the ministers of attempted political interference in how law enforcement agencies manage protests against the government.

“I hope the government is not asking me to say that it wants more aggressive enforcement to suppress the protest against it, against the professional judgment of the [police] commanders on the ground and the state prosecution,” she stated in response to the wave of denunciations.

“I hope that the government is not expecting the law enforcement system to fill quotas for arrests or indictments against protesters,” she added.

At the end of the meeting, Baharav-Miara was asked to submit a document to the cabinet detailing law enforcement policy toward road-blocking, protests at elected officials’ homes, and calls for refusal to serve in the military and other forms of disobedience.

She was also told to present a clear policy on enforcement at Ben Gurion Airport, where protesters previously disrupted operations by flooding the main terminal earlier this month. Baharav-Miara said that the airport was a public space where demonstrations were permitted. A subsequent protest at the airport last Tuesday, as part of a wider “day of disruption” across the country, saw police set up cordoned-off areas for the demonstration, some of whom briefly blocked roads.

Prior to the cabinet meeting last week, Baharav-Miara warned Netanyahu against any political interference in the police’s response to mass demonstrations amid mounting concerns that his hardline government would dial up the pressure on the law enforcement system to suppress the protests on its behalf.

Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai, who was also summoned to the meeting, insisted that it was the policy of police to prevent the blocking of highways and intersections and stressed that the force was apolitical.

Protesters are planning another “day of resistance” on Tuesday, in addition to the weekly demonstrations on Saturdays.

Protests are planned across the country as the coalition redoubles its efforts to pass the “reasonableness” bill into law before parliament recesses at the end of the month.

The contentious legislation seeks to prevent courts from using the test of “reasonableness” in evaluating decisions made by the government or elected officials.

Protest organizers said Tuesday’s protests “will start an unprecedented week of civil resistance and disobedience to the judicial overhaul.”

The government’s decision to push ahead with the reasonableness bill has also sparked fresh warnings from Israel Defense Force reservists — including from pilots and elite commando units — that they would stop showing up for duty if the legislation goes ahead.

On Friday, they were joined by the Israel Medical Association, which warned that hospitals and doctors could strike in opposition to the bill.

The warnings of harm to the medical sector join similar warnings issued by high-tech workers, economists, lawyers, and military officials, all cautioning that the legislation — if passed — would harm Israel’s democracy, economy and security.