Government work processes in the current government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have consistently been ‘’flawed,” Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara warned in a sharply worded letter to Netanyahu on Tuesday.
“For some time, significant government decisions were made with flawed work processes,” the letter began.
“This, without them being preempted by professional staff work; while having them passed to relevant bodies for comment just before or during government meetings, in a manner that does neither enables the professional bodies, nor the ministers, to fulfill their role and duty; and also based on unauthorized legal opinions, whether by private elements or the government secretary,” Baharav-Miara continued.
“The result is a violation of the law and causes harm to the public,” she wrote.
“We warned in the past against disruption of government work processes and of the unraveling of rules that regulate the government’s work. Recently this has reached an extreme,” the attorney general wrote.
She gave as an example the government’s decision on April 30, in which it gave itself the right to have a private attorney represent all of the government ministries in a High Court of Justice hearing on the issue of drafting the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community for IDF service. Baharav-Miara agreed at the time for private representation of the government plenum, but not of specific ministries such as the defense and finance ministries.
Illegal decision-making and unauthorized security opinions
The government’s attempt to broaden its private representation was intended to “prevent the attorney general from ensuring that the government’s steps on the issue of drafting and funding haredim were legal,” Baharav-Miara wrote in Tuesday’s letter. The High Court ruled in June that the government decision had been made illegally, as the attorney general alone was authorized to award the government private representation and define its limits.
Another “severe” example was a legal opinion provided by Government Secretary Yossi Fuchs in a letter on July 31, with “serious ramifications in the security realm.” Baharav-Miara did not expand further but stressed that Fuchs had not been authorized to give such opinions.
“The general principle is that the government secretariat must act in a professional and stately manner to ensure the properness of the government’s work. A central duty of the government secretary is to ensure that the government makes decisions while maintaining proper and systematized work procedures, for the benefit of the public. This would have prevented a significant portion of the failures that occurred,” Baharav-Miara wrote.
“Things must return to their track, and the sooner the better,” she concluded.
BAHARAV-MIARA’S COMMENTS came after the government on Sunday added an item to the agenda of its weekly meeting at the last minute – the appointment of a temporary chairperson for the powerful Second Authority for Television and Radio. Several times over the past few weeks, the government added other items to the agenda at the last minute, some of them controversial. The agenda is generally made public ahead of time, but it does not always include all of the items that the government actually ends up discussing.
Fuchs issued a statement in response.
“The government secretary views severely the fact that the attorney general gives publicity to a top-secret letter that the government secretary who is also secretary of the National Security Cabinet, to the National Security Adviser, with a copy to the Military Secretary to the Prime Minister and to the attorney-general,” Fuchs wrote.
“In complete contrast to the attorney-general’s claim, the government secretary’s letter was sent within the framework of his authority as National Security Cabinet secretary, does not serve as a legal opinion, and its content has no ramifications on the security realm. It is not by chance that no security official made any comments regarding the letter,” Fuchs continued.
“The attempt to attribute ‘serious ramifications in the security realm’ in a public letter that the attorney-general published, to a letter that dealt only with professional executive issues – distorts the facts, [and] harms the cabinet’s work and public trust,” Fuchs concluded.
Baharav-Miara’s letter to Netanyahu reflected criticism of the prime minister in two National Committees of Investigation, the first that investigated the 2021 Meron Disaster, whose final results were released in March, and the investigation of government purchases of submarines and missile boats from Germany, which sent out a warning to Netanyahu that he may be negatively affected by the findings.
Both reports looked at work procedures under Netanyahu. The warning issued by the latter found “a deep disruption in work processes and decision-making mechanisms in a range of sensitive issues, creating a risk to national security and harming Israel’s foreign relations and economic interests.”
The Meron Report detailed how under Netanyahu there was negligence, lack of preparation, absence of governance, no enforcement of construction laws, and conflict over responsibilities, authority, and land ownership by politicians, civil servants, and law enforcement, which led to dangerous overcrowding and hazardous and illegal facility conditions, year after year, during the pilgrimage to the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai for Lag Ba’omer.
Michael Starr contributed to this report