Report: Probe underway into whether Netanyahu’s office orchestrated Arab vote-buying scandal to undermine election

Law enforcement officials are probing whether information that led to an investigation into alleged vote-buying in the Arab public was planted deliberately by officials in the Prime Minister’s Office to manufacture arrests that would bolster Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims on and after Election Day that Arab parties had stolen the vote, Channel 12’s investigative program Uvda reports.

Uvda reports that an initial complaint against activists for the Ra’am party that led to the arrests of several people on election day was supplied to police by Netanyahu’s chief of staff Ido Norden a day before the October 27 vote. It further reveals that Norden also allegedly referred police to a source who he said could provide purported intelligence to back up that complaint. It says that this source, who was indeed contacted by the police ahead of the arrests, is a former Prime Minister’s Office employee.

Hours after the complaint against the Ra’am activists was made, in the early hours of election day, police arrested the men, searched their homes and released a statement claiming officers had found envelopes containing tens of thousands of shekels in cash. However, all three men have since been freed; the investigation has apparently hit a dead end; no charges have been brought in the matter, and judges have questioned investigators’ conduct.

Though the arrests and subsequent investigation have led to little results of substance, according to multiple reports on the state of police’s efforts, they served to undermine public confidence in the vote and were swiftly used by the prime minister to allege the election had been stolen by Arab parties.

Uvda says Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and the police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division are now investigating whether police were used by the PMO to delegitimize the election in a pre-planned effort.

Separately, Channel 12 also reports that Shin Bet chief David Zini sought on Election Day to wiretap five Arab lawmakers in connection with separate suspicions, made public two days later, of foreign interference in Israel’s election — an investigation whose announcement sent shockwaves through the country but which has also seemingly fizzled out.

The Attorney General’s Office “was horrified by the request” for the wiretaps and fended it off, Channel 12 says.

Two days after the election, after Zini presented information on possible interference to Central Elections Committee chair Noam Sohlberg, leading Sohlberg to instruct him to probe the interference allegations, the Shin Bet chief met with Yashar party head Gadi Eisenkot, Netanyahu’s lead challenger. During the meeting at Zini’s office, Channel 12 reports that the Shin Bet chief pulled out a large binder of intelligence and said that “since 2018 the Arabs have been stealing the elections in Israel. All the Shin Bet heads have ignored it. I came and turned over this stone.”

Zini has since come under intense criticism by unnamed law enforcement officials who have accused him of waging an unwarranted crusade based on scant evidence.

Responding to Uvda’s reporting, a senior enforcement official familiar with the matter is quoted by the network saying: “These events have shown me that there will be no more fair elections here. When the Shin Bet and the police operate in this manner, whether deliberately or inadvertently, we cannot guarantee that the next elections will be fair.”