Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday advanced an amendment to the General Security Service Law requiring the attorney general to take a polygraph exam every two years and answer questions about alleged leaks of classified information.
The legislation sponsored by Otzma Yehudit Party lawmaker Yitzhak Kroizer would also apply to deputy attorneys general, the state attorney and additional senior officials in the Ministry of Justice.
The explanatory notes to Kroizer’s bill say that public trust in Israel’s law enforcement system has been “very low” due to “constant leaks, selective enforcement and the promotion of personal interests.”
It states that all senior officials in the Attorney General’s Office and the Justice Ministry’s advisory and legislative branches should be required to take polygraph exams, just as senior law enforcement, intelligence and military officials already do, as a way to “increase public trust.”
Kroizer told JNS on Monday that he sponsored the legislation “first and foremost to ensure full equality between the gatekeepers of the judicial system and senior security officials.
“It cannot be that someone wielding enormous power to decide the fate of citizens and public figures is exempt from control mechanisms designed to ensure integrity,” the Knesset member told JNS.
“The measure is also intended to eradicate inappropriate leaks from sensitive investigations and deliberations, ensuring that information is handled in a clean and professional manner,” continued Kroizer.
“This step is also meant to restore public trust in the judicial system, based on the understanding that those with nothing to hide should not fear a credibility test affirming their integrity before the public,” he said.
Addressing the government’s attempts to remove Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara from her post, Kroizer said the Cabinet effectively dismissed her, but that she has refused to step down following a Supreme Court ruling canceling the dismissal.
“She has repeatedly proven to be an incompetent legal adviser,” he said. “She torpedoed every government initiative and prevented it from functioning. There was no alternative but to dismiss her.”
(Baharav-Miara’s title in Hebrew is “the legal adviser to the government,” which is translated into English as attorney general.)
Last year, a routine polygraph exam of an Israel Defense Forces military prosecution officer helped trigger a criminal investigation into the leak of surveillance footage from the Sde Teiman detention facility.
Some members of the coalition, including Otzma Yehudit Party leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, have accused Baharav-Miara of aiding the suspects in the leak.
According to Israeli law, Baharav-Miara does not work for the ruling government, as opposed to in the United States, where the attorney general is an agent of the executive branch.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others members of his government have often clashed with Baharav-Miara, who was appointed to the post in 2022 by the coalition led by then-premier Naftali Bennett.
