Gilad Kariv, a lawmaker for Israel’s far-left The Democrats Party, was interrogated by police on Monday morning as a suspect in leaking information from a closed Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting.
Kariv, who entered the Knesset in 2021 as the first-ever Reform rabbi to be voted into the Jewish state’s parliament, was questioned for an hour by the Israel Police’s Lahav 433 National Unit for International Crimes.
According to Israel’s Kan News public broadcaster, the MK did not cooperate with a “significant part of the investigators’ questions.”
“As I declared I would, I showed up for questioning today, in accordance with the obligation placed on every citizen,” Kariv said after he spoke to police. “The probe stems from a political and vindictive complaint filed by Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana. The complaint undermines parliamentary immunity and is intended to silence opposition.
“The quotes in the article by journalist Ben Caspit, which form the basis of the complaint, were approved by the Censor and contain no classified information,” Kariv added. He denied harming state security.
During the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee meeting in question, on June 13, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a classified briefing to lawmakers. MKs were not permitted to bring their phones to the meeting, but excerpts from it were published some six months later.
A Knesset investigation found that Kariv was the only one who reviewed the minutes of the committee meeting twice, and he marked the parts that were published by Maariv’s Caspit with a highlighter.
Last month, Netanyahu cited the affair as an example of incidents the media and law-enforcement officials have failed to investigate.
“None of this is being investigated. And what is being probed? Made-up tales. Lies about my wife, my son, my health situation …,” the Israeli leader fumed in a confrontation with opposition lawmakers.
The Democrats is a merger of the former Labor and Meretz parties and is led by former Meretz MK Yair Golan, who is also a former deputy economy minister and ex-deputy chief of IDF staff.