It all started with an old mobile phone. This much-too-smart phone set off one of the juiciest scandals to hit Israel in modern times, threatening to tarnish the image of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, whose meteoric political rise has generated speculation of a future run for the premiership. The phone belongs to attorney Effi Naveh, the all-powerful chair of the Israel Bar Association (IBA). Until his resignation this week, Naveh was a strategic ally of the justice minister’s. He was the one who helped her lead the dramatic double reform of changing the judicial appointments’ process and appointing to the bench many conservative judges (out of the hundreds appointed during her term as minister).
All this has now collapsed into a deep black hole, with Naveh suspected of pushing through a judge’s appointment in return for sexual favors, turning the IBA into a byzantine harem and contaminating Israel’s sacrosanct judicial appointments system.