Ombudsman upholds ethics complaint against top judge, doesn’t recommend disciplinary action

State Ombudsman for Judges Judge Asher Kula closed a series of ethics complaints against Supreme Court President Isaac Amit on Wednesday, finding just one of 10 against the top judge to be justified but not worthy of disciplinary action.

The lone complaint that Kula said was justified was that Amit should have recused himself from a case that had the potential to benefit his brother.

Kula dismissed the nine other complaints against the justice, many of which were filed just before Amit was appointed president of the court in January 2025.

The ombudsman said some of the complaints should never have been submitted at all, in one instance asserting that the organization that submitted the complaint “simply threw claims with no substance out into the air.”

In other cases, Kula said it would have been better for Amit to have taken certain actions to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, even if none actually existed.

Kula also rejected a much-publicized complaint against Amit regarding alleged building violations by the judge and criticized those who had labeled Amit “a construction criminal,” determining that the allegations were false and that such claims had done “a significant injustice” to Amit and his family.

The ombudsman further noted, pointedly, that the complaints against Amit were based on “reviews of thousands of judicial decisions he issued” as a lower court and Supreme Court judge.

The complaints were almost all submitted by right-wing legal advocacy organizations, which apparently conducted such reviews. Amit himself had previously alleged that the complaints were part of a concerted effort to delegitimize his candidacy for Supreme Court president.

From October 2023 until January 2025, Justice Minister Yariv Levin refused to call a vote in the Judicial Selection Committee on appointing a new Supreme Court President, because he opposed Amit and did not have the votes to elect his preferred candidate for president, Yosef Elron, to head the court.

When the High Court finally ordered Levin to hold the vote, numerous reports of ethics violations against Amit emerged in the press, which Kula has now adjudicated, leading Levin to further delay the committee vote on the president until the court insisted he hold the vote immediately.

Amit said in response that he would respect Kula’s findings and would take them into account.

“The ombudsman’s decision was made after dozens of complaints were filed regarding President Amit – complaints that were filed after tens of thousands of decisions he made throughout his approximately 30-year tenure as a judge were examined,” Amit added.

Levin nevertheless called for Amit to resign, saying it was “unthinkable” that a Supreme Court judge had been found to have had a conflict of interest on a case he dealt with.

The justice minister also filed a disciplinary complaint against Amit to the Disciplinary Court for Judges. The court is composed of five judges, including at least three Supreme Court justices, and the Supreme Court president or deputy president heads the panel.

The complaint, which Kula upheld, related to a petition filed against a government decision in February 2021 to abolish Israel’s “Pool of Directors,” a select group of candidates for membership on the board of directors of government companies in Israel. These are considered prestigious positions with substantive financial remuneration.

Amit’s brother, Hanoch Goldfriend, was one of the 400 members of the Pool of Directors, but Amit, who was serving as a judge on the Supreme Court at the time but was not yet president, did not recuse himself from the case.

Amit dealt with the initial processing of the petition since he was the judge on duty when it was filed.

He made three procedural decisions on the case and issued an order freezing the government’s decision until a full judicial panel could address the issue, before it was passed to a three-judge panel.

The petition was eventually dropped in October 2021, after the government changed course. The complaint alleged that Amit had a conflict of interest in dealing with the case due to his brother’s membership in the pool, and the possibility that he could benefit from a ruling annulling the government’s decision to abolish the body.

Kula said, therefore, that Amit should have immediately disclosed his conflict of interest as soon as he received the case as the duty judge.

Amit argued in response to the complaint that his brother’s membership on the Pool of Directors was due to expire at the end of 2021 and that he had not re-applied for membership, meaning that Amit himself did not have a conflict of interest in dealing with the petition.

But Kula rejected his arguments, saying that those circumstances were coincidental, especially bearing in mind that Goldfriend did eventually reapply for membership in 2022.

Kula said that freezing the government’s decision therefore “did have the potential, even if temporarily, to influence the [court] president’s brother, both in terms of his inclusion in the pool and in terms of his ability to run for a director position in a particular company.”

Goldfriend’s subsequent decision to reapply for the Pool of Directors, said Kula, “is evidence that the president’s dealing with the petition and granting the interim injunction had some measure of influence on Goldfriend’s election [to the pool], not only potentially, but also in fact.”

The state ombudsman for judges is entitled to recommend disciplinary action for ethics violations he deems warrant such steps. Kula’s decision not to recommend such action indicates he did not regard the Pool of Directors’ case as a disciplinary violation.