When Justice Minister Amir Ohana ascended to the Knesset dais Nov. 6 with a sheet of paper in hand, no one present attributed any importance to what seemed like a routine event. As they quickly learned, he would be dropping a bombshell. Much to everybody’s shock, the justice minister took advantage of his parliamentary immunity to give a detailed account of the unusual methods used by police interrogators against Nir Hefetz, a state witness in the case against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A court had placed a gag order on the information, yet Ohana was sharing it from the Knesset dais on live TV. In so doing, despite the gag order, he was revealing intimate details about Nir Hefetz’s personal life and the life of someone close to him.
Ohana did this just a few weeks before Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced his decision in the various criminal cases involving Netanyahu. It was his attempt to prove what he and the prime minister have long believed: Netanyahu will not receive a fair trial, because Israel’s law enforcement agencies are waging a malicious campaign against him.