The government approved Gil Limon as the next deputy attorney-general for administrative affairs, replacing Dina Zilber who stepped down in December.
Limon won the role after approval by a five member professional panel led by his current boss, Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit. Limon served with Mandelblit in the IDF legal division, then became his top aide when Mandelblit was cabinet secretary and remained his top aide beginning in 2016 when his boss became attorney-general.
The new deputy attorney-general appointment on Sunday was viewed as significant on multiple levels.
First, the prior government of Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz had left the critical role vacant for an extended period, because of their inability to agree on any issue relating to the legal establishment and the rule of law.
The filling of the position, along with the approval of Amit Aisman as state attorney and other key appointments, signals a return to normalcy and functionality for the legal establishment.
Limon’s appointment was also a sign of IDF legal division alumni achieving positions of major influence throughout the government.
Mandelblit himself was a previous military advocate general; Deputy Attorney-General for International Affairs Roy Schondorf and many of his top aides formerly served in the IDF International Law Division (ILD); senior members of the National Security Council in recent years were graduates from the same ILD; and Limon himself is an alumna of the ILD.
There is nothing problematic about this trend, and each individual official who has been promoted up the chain of government roles has been viewed as worthy.
In fact, there is even a logic to senior IDF lawyers, especially from the elite ILD, later achieving high roles in government, given that they often address some of the thorniest and most complex issues confronting the state during their military service.
The third significant element of Limon’s appointment was that some good government NGOs objected that it was too much of an insider appointment.
According to objectors like the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, Limon was too close to Mandelblit for the attorney-general to serve on the panel appointing him.
In other words, these objectors said that Mandelblti could have sat on the panel if he had no conflict of interest or allowed the panel to review Limon’s candidacy, provided he did not participate.
Mandelblit rejected this view, saying that he and Limon had a solely professional relationship and he would not unduly favor him.
Despite these assurances, the Jerusalem Post is aware that the relationship between the two is very close, after a decade of working together almost constantly, even if it is more of a mentor-aide role than a relationship of equals of the same age (Mandelblit is 58 and Limon is 44.)
There is no rule barring an appointment under such circumstances, given that former attorney-general Yehuda Weinstein did exactly the same with Raz Nizri, who went from being his top aide to being a deputy attorney-general.
This is also true because as long as the deputy attorney-general is qualified, there is an expectation of there being a strong connection between them and the attorney-general whose policies they support.
The broader concern of a small cadre of army legal officials from the same unit ascending to key positions throughout the government could be seen as a byproduct of how small the Jewish state remains even in 2021.
But it could also encourage a certain amount of groupthink and excessive deference to the political class.
In terms of substance, Limon is expected to make fewer waves than Zilber.
Zilber went out of her way in certain instances to frame Netanyahu, his previous government and some of his lieutenants, like Miri Regev, as attackers of the rule of law.
Moreover, she not only tried to block government initiatives that were blatantly illegal, but also went public with some of her opposition to initiatives that were controversial, but not against any formal law.
In contrast, Limon is more likely to take Mandelblit’s strategy of never challenging government policies unless they explicitly violate the law. Where Mandelblit has challenged government initiatives as illegal, he has usually tried to do so quietly and to avoid newspaper headlines.
Not in the case of his indictment of Netanyahu, but even in such cases, he conveyed a message of being unavoidably dragged to enforce the law despite misgivings, as opposed to Zilber, who seemed to relish publicly describing questionable government moves as destructive to democracy.
At certain points, Mandelblit even barred Zilber from certain public appearances to reduce tension between his office and the political class.
Limon has spent his career finding justifications for the IDF’s West Bank Wall, for IDF conduct when attacked by the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone Report, and for a variety of government initiatives since then – as long as they were not explicitly prohibited.