The Jerusalem District Court’s handling of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial has undertaken a dizzying number of zigzags in its pacing.
The bottom line is that the judges on Monday night gave Netanyahu what he wanted in terms of timing, having pushed off two major trial moments until after two different elections.
After a November 2019 indictment, the first witness will only be called on April 5 because the judges agreed to at least four major delays, which they initially said they would never agree to.
There might have been an initial expectation of calling witnesses in mid-2020.
But the first moment, the first pretrial hearing, was delayed once by the judges to avoid the March 2020 elections, and a second delay came during the first coronavirus wave. So the first pretrial hearing of any kind was not until May 24, 2020.
At that hearing, the prosecution said the trial could start by summer 2020, while the defense said no earlier than spring 2021.
Trying to find a middle ground, the court said witnesses would start being called in December 2020.
However, the defense then started to file a series of motions to annul the indictment in an effort to compel the prosecution to amend the indictment and to force the turning over of additional evidence.
Fights over these technical issues were drawn out and did lead to the prosecution amending the indictment and turning over a couple dozen documents out of hundreds of additional documents requested by the defense.
Each time the defense won on an issue, however minor, it demanded more time to analyze the evolving factual landscape.
Somewhere in this mix, the court lost track of its vision that a November 2019 indictment with a first hearing in May 2020 should start hearing witnesses by December 2020.
Instead, the judges appeared to be dragged from one small battle to the next, adding on a few weeks each time.
But there was still absolutely no reason the first witness could not have been called before Election Day on March 23 other than that the judges got cold feet.
After numerous delays, including a completely unnecessary one during the third coronavirus lockdown, during which the courts were allowed to continue to operate, the February 8 hearing was expected to set the calling of witnesses for late February.
Somehow, the court got fixated on technical issues related to later witnesses, who might not be called for months, to make the idea of calling witnesses post-election more reasonable.
To push things until after the election, the court was expected to wait until legal developments scheduled for March 1 to set the actual date for calling witnesses.
AT THIS point, the court started to take some serious criticism from the anti-Netanyahu camp for giving him the spring 2021 date that it had previously said it would not give him.
Why did the court at this point randomly move up setting the witness schedule by one week, while making the announcement after the 8:00 p.m. news on a Monday?
The probable answer – trying to give a mixed and neutral message – relates to the simultaneous multiple decisions it issued on Monday night.
The latest major request from the defense was to either annul the indictment or toss large volumes of evidence out of the case, being that Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit only approved aspects of the probe into Netanyahu verbally and not in writing.
As expected, the court rejected these requests in substance since the law does not say the attorney-general must approve probes of a prime minister in writing, only that he must approve them.
However, to appear balanced, the court went out of its way to criticize Mandelblit.
According to the judges, in a case of such import, it would have been far more proper for Mandelblit to approve each issue in writing so that there was a record beyond any question.
It is possible that Mandelblit gave verbal approvals because Netanyahu is only the second prime minister to be indicted, and so there is no real set custom.
Or it is possible he intentionally kept approvals verbal to reduce the risk of leaks back in the early years of the case, when he hoped that maybe he could avoid indicting Netanyahu.
Whatever the reason, there was no need for the court to rebuke Mandelblit other than to appear balanced and supportive of some of the Netanyahu narrative as it rejected his core arguments. It appears the court wanted to set the opposite tone by announcing the calling of witnesses earlier.
By doing so, the court made some noise about future witnesses who will be called against the prime minister just as voters are judging him.
Likewise, if some anti-Netanyahu critics were raising the possibility of further delays beyond April, this could quell that criticism. Putting out all of these decisions on the same night was meant to present the court as heeding both sides and being neutral.
The question is whether the court will continue to try to appear neutral going forward, even if at some point the evidence points strongly more toward one side than the other.