Do not envy Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit. By Dec. 18, he will have to choose between the lesser of two evils — to tell the Supreme Court that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career is over, or that in his opinion a politician charged with criminal wrongdoing can continue serving as prime minister.

If he goes for the first option, State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan, who just stepped down, will have to make way for him at the top of the political right’s list of villains. And if Mandelblit decides that in the State of Israel, criminal offenses such as bribery, fraud and breach of trust should not stand in a person’s way to the prime minister’s office, he risks a resonating defeat in the country’s top court. If that happens, he may go down in the legal-ethical history of Israel and the Western world as the jurist who allowed a politician to spend the morning in the defendant’s box in court and to conduct fateful decision-making security Cabinet sessions in the evenings.

Unfortunately for Mandelblit, Justice Ofer Grosskopf, who received a petition on this issue last week, refused to let him off the hook, rejecting his claim that the issue of the accused Netanyahu’s eligibility to form Israel’s next government is theoretical at this stage. In response to a petition submitted on behalf of 67 leading figures in Israel’s high-tech industry by Attorney Dafna Holz-Lechner, Grosskopf asked Mandelblit to tell him when the issue would no longer be theoretical. Or, in other words, when the issue would require a legal ruling. The attorney general and Netanyahu were also ordered to present their position on the possibility that the top court would rule on the question of whether Netanyahu was fit to be tasked with forming the country’s next government.