Judge in libel suit says MK Gotliv can’t get blanket immunity for exposing Shin Bet agent

The Lod District Court ruled Tuesday that Likud MK Tally Gotliv does not enjoy automatic parliamentary immunity from a civil defamation lawsuit filed against her by anti-government protest leader Shikma Bressler for revealing the identity of her partner, a Shin Bet agent.

The court ruled, however, that Gotliv does have immunity from the other items detailed in the lawsuit, thus dismissing it, with the exception of the items related to her revealing the identity of the Shin Bet officer, which he said need further examination.

The lawsuit, filed by Bressler last year, is separate from the criminal proceedings against Gotliv initiated by the Attorney General’s Office for revealing the Shin Bet officer’s identity. The proximity in timing appeared to be a coincidence.

On Monday, the Knesset House Committee voted to grant Gotliv immunity from criminal prosecution in the case. The matter is set to be brought before the Knesset plenum for final approval on Wednesday. Any immunity granted, however, would expire at the conclusion of the current Knesset’s term in the coming weeks.

The civil lawsuit and the criminal case both refer to a series of social media posts from Gotliv in 2024 in which she identified Bressler’s husband as a Shin Bet agent, while promoting baseless conspiracy theories linking him to Hamas and insinuating that he bore responsibility for the October 7, 2023, terror onslaught.

In his ruling, Judge Rami Haimovich explained that Gotliv’s parliamentary immunity was being mostly upheld because the reason such immunity exists is to “ensure a proper democratic process.”

“Caution should be exercised against restricting the freedom of speech and expression of Knesset members, for fear of a chilling effect that would make carrying out their job difficult,” he said.

Haimovich therefore upheld Gotliv’s immunity for the parts of the defamation lawsuit relating to strongly-worded accusations and attacks she lobbed at Bressler, deeming Bressler a public figure and ruling that Knesset members are allowed to criticize her, even using inflammatory language, since courts are not supposed to judge lawmakers’ styles of expression.

However, he noted, “immunity is not absolute.”

As such, the portion of the lawsuit pertaining to the identity of Bressler’s husband will not be dismissed out of hand, in line with a Supreme Court ruling that determined that intentional disclosure of the identity of a security official does not qualify for immunity,” Haimovich wrote in his decision.

Furthermore, he wrote, Gotliv did not reveal the agent’s identity in a “neutral security context,” but rather due to his relationship with anti-government activist Bressler and alongside claims relating to Bressler’s alleged influence on the war against Hamas.

“In these circumstances, it cannot be ruled as a threshold argument that immunity applies for these publications, and further examination is needed,” he concluded.

Gotliv has repeatedly alleged that US intelligence agencies had intercepted a conversation between Bressler’s partner and then-Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar in the run-up to October 7, 2023.

According to the conspiracy theory, then-Mossad head David Barnea had summoned Bressler for a meeting as a result of the intelligence, days before the October 7 attack on southern Israel.

Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the Likud party, and the Mossad spy agency have repeatedly and forcibly denied the claims.

Bressler filed the NIS 2.6 million ($890,000 at the current exchange rate) defamation suit against Gotliv in February 2024.

Since entering the Knesset after elections in November 2022, Gotliv has established a reputation for making incendiary claims, such as accusing the Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet of “working for terrorists.”

Bressler, a renowned physicist, shot to national prominence as one of the most visible and articulate leaders of the nationwide protest movement that sprung up in 2023 against the government’s judicial overhaul plans that critics said would undermine democracy in Israel.