Now you won’t rush to judgment?

The police have found themselves in the crosshairs for many things over the last several years, including accusations of sexual harassment, corruption and shoddy detective work. One running theme though was that their bosses in the halls of power, the politicians who ran on platforms of law and order, always backed them. That’s not the case in the press Friday, though, as papers observe cops getting thrown under the proverbial bus by politicians looking for an easy scapegoat, and by justice officials seemingly backing those politicians.

That is most prominently seen in the Umm al-Hiran terror-not terror case, as government figures admitted the deadly incident may not have been an intentional attack and blamed their rush to brand the case as terror on faulty intelligence from the police. But it also shows up in a story covered only by Haaretz that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit won’t let the police depose former US Secretary of State John Kerry and former US envoy Dan Shapiro as part of an investigation into Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ties to Hollywood mogul and US visa seeker Arnon Milchan.

Israel Hayom’s front page quotes Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan saying he’ll apologize if it turns out he’s wrong over the Umm al-Hiran incident, but the headline over the actual story reads “we need to wait until the investigation is complete.”

The headline and story telegraph official attempts to take pressure off officials amid reports that an internal Justice Ministry probe has found that Yousef Abu al-Qia’an was shot by police before his car hit officer Erez Levi and that he was not in fact a terrorist, displaying exactly the sort of caution before making claims that was not shown by police, Erdan, Netanyahu or certain journalists after the Umm al-Hiran incident a month ago.

“A police investigation and the testimony of police on the scene pointed unequivocally that this was a car-ramming attack in which an officer was killed. As a minister who was not at the scene, I can only rely on the police,” Erdan is quoted saying in the paper, foisting his quick insistence that the incident was terror on the police.

Columnist Haim Shine criticizes those who are quick to jump to conclusions based on incomplete information, but don’t worry, he’s not talking about Erdan, other officials and himself. He’s talking about those who dare speak out based on the reports of the internal inquiry’s findings before the findings have been published.

“Unfortunately, in Israel we have been witness to a widespread trend by which rumors turn immediately into ‘checked-out facts’ and nobody has the time or patience to wait for an investigation to be completed,” he writes.

For those curious just how hypocritical Shine is being, consider that on the day after the incident his paper reported with no compunction that Abu al-Qia’an was a terrorist and that he drove at the cops at a high speed with his lights off – all things that now seem to have been disproven – and Shine himself smeared the driver as connected to the Islamic State, with little to no evidence.

“I believe the words of the police chief at the funeral of Erez Shaul Levy, the officer who was killed, that at the school where the rammer taught were teachers who taught the ideology of IS,” he wrote at the time, adding that car-rammings were a favored IS method.

Even if the probe comes out and Erdan apologizes, it’s doubtful Shine will do the same. Yedioth Ahronoth’s Yoaz Hendel, though, doesn’t even wait for that and leads off his Friday column with a mea culpa for mistakenly giving full backing to the police’s version of events. But he also partially exculpates police chief Roni Alsheikh and Erdan, saying they played a small role in a larger story regarding how Israel treats its minorities.

“They aren’t the bad guys in the story, but at the worst incompetent. If these results [that it was not terror] are what the Police Internal Investigations Department winds up with, we all need to apologize.”

The paper’s Nahum Barnea, though, finds no reason to apologize, recalling that after the attack he took a properly jaundiced view of the versions of events compared the police’s claim of terror to their apparently premature accusations during the wave of fires in November. Barnea is however critical of both Erdan and Alsheikh, writing that their inability to own up has only made a bad mistake worse.

“The suspicions around Abu al-Qia’an were natural and legitimate. The haste by which the police chief – and after him even more staunchly Erdan – insisted that this was terror, was a mistake that should not be allowed to pass. They wouldn’t have been so quick if it was a Jew,” he writes. “The police chief reported to various officials that police only shot at abu al-Qia’an after he ran over the cop. That was the second mistake. Somebody in the police life to their superiors. The third mistake, the most unfortunate, was that week after that tragic morning the police chief refused to admit that perhaps he spoke to hastily. The Bedouin, whose faith in institutions of the state has never been high, lost what little they still had.”

While Erdan was the only one to say he would apologize thus far, Haaretz’s editorial cartoon shows him telling Alsheikh, “I’ve got it. You apologize and I’ll accept your apology.”

Sympathy for the police’s position when dealing with politicians extends to the paper’s lead story, which reports that the attorney general is blocking police from doing their job in investigating Netanyahu. The paper reports that Mandelblit’s position is that the police have all the evidence they need that Netanyahu contacted US officials to secure a 10-year visa for Milchan, but police still want to interview Kerry and Shapiro “to complete the evidence and reach as clear, accurate and reliable a picture as possible with regard to the facts of the case.”

“In this situation the attorney general believes that there’s no real need to take statements” a source is quoted telling the paper. “We are still in the midst of the investigation and if it turns out that questioning one of the senior Americans is required, the testimony will be taken. But every effort will be made to avoid this step.”

The relationship between politicians, police and justice officials may have gotten even more complicated with the selection of new judges intended to move the Supreme Court sharply to the right this week and papers continue to tackle the move Friday.

In Yedioth, that rightward shift is exemplified by the appointment of David Mintz, who lives in the settlement of Dolev deep inside the West Bank.

Under the headline “Now you don’t need a D9,” a reference to Mintz’s neighbor MK Moti Yogev calling to bulldoze the High Court over the razing of illegally built settlement homes, the paper rounds up the opinions of some of Mintz’s other settlement-mates, including a 10-year old judicial scholar who says “It’s cool, really cool. Now there won’t be as many leftists there.”

There are still plenty of lefties around, though, and Haaretz, suddenly in the position of seeing one of the state’s last liberal bastions slip away, tries to be stoic over the appointment and take the high road, despite chafing at the appointment of judges based on ideological grounds, a position it likely would not have taken had four left-wing judges been tapped.

“Now that the four new justices have been chosen, we must rise above the disputes of the past,” the paper writes in its lead editorial. “As for those right wingers who rushed to rejoice as if the newly chosen justices will be their representatives on the bench – it would behoove them to hold off with the celebrations. One hopes that someone who is entrusted with upholding the law and is loyal to the truth will not make judicial rulings in accordance with a political agenda, whether he sits on a district court or the Supreme Court.”