Government plans to boycott AG after it dismisses her but before High Court ruling on case

The government is planning to boycott Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, after its expected vote to dismiss her from office next week, The Times of Israel has learned.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s expectation is that after the vote to fire the attorney general, the government will stop working with her, including ceasing to invite her to cabinet meetings and meetings of the security cabinet.

The boycott, first reported by Haaretz, is being planned because the High Court of Justice ruled 10 days ago that if Baharav-Miara is fired by the government, that decision will be frozen until the court has had time to address petitions filed against the dismissal process.

Boycotting the attorney general would be a way for the government to circumvent the High Court ruling without disobeying its order outright, unless the court were to issue new instructions regarding the government’s relationship with Baharav-Miara once she is formally fired and while it reviews the case.

The government had been expected to hold a vote on firing the attorney general on Sunday, but the scheduled cabinet meeting was canceled, reportedly at the request of religious ministers who did not wish to take such a controversial step during the Nine Days period leading up to the fast of the Ninth of Av.

The cabinet is now expected to vote on firing Baharav-Miara at its next scheduled meeting, on August 4, a day after the fast.

At the beginning of last week, a ministerial committee recommended to the cabinet that it fire Baharav-Miara due to “substantive and ongoing differences of opinion between the government and the attorney general, preventing effective cooperation.”

Liberal government watchdog groups had filed petitions to the High Court against the dismissal process before the committee made its recommendation, but the court declined to freeze the process, arguing that it could only intervene after a final decision is made.

The court did, however, rule that if the government were to fire the attorney general, the decision would not take immediate effect, so as to allow the court time to rule on the matter.

Justice Noam Sohlberg, who made the ruling, seemed to hint that the court already views the dismissal process as problematic, stating that he was making his ruling in light of “difficulties highlighted by the petitioners” and “the apparent chances of the petition.”

The government’s current effort to fire Baharav-Miara is especially controversial, since it changed the process to fire her after having already tried and failed to dismiss her using the original criteria set out in a cabinet resolution from 2000.

In March, the government initiated the process of firing the attorney general through the recommendation of the professional committee used to appoint her in 2022, under the terms of the 2000 cabinet resolution.

But in June, after failing to staff that committee, the cabinet passed a resolution establishing the new five-member ministerial committee that could make the recommendation instead.