Israeli Public Security Minister Amir Ohana accused Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit of waging a campaign to “politically eliminate” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
During an on-stage interview at a conference held by the Hebrew-language weekly B’Sheva, Ohana said that Mandelblit knows that if “Netanyahu is acquitted, his [Mandelblit’s own] public career is finished.”
Ohana, whose ministerial responsibilities include oversight of the police, said that this is why the attorney general has been enabling the weekly anti-Netanyahu protests to continue.
“These are serious” accusations, the public security minister acknowledged, “but I stand behind them.”
According to Channel 12, Mandelblit responded by calling Ohana’s remarks “very regrettable.”
“It is, of course, a crazy and false conspiracy theory that does not have the slightest connection to reality and therefore does not deserve a substantive response,” the attorney general said.
This was the latest flare-up in relations between the public security minister and attorney general.
In July, Ohana sent an angry letter to Mandelblit, in response to the latter’s refusal to cancel a regulation stipulating that a senior member of the State Attorney’s Office must sign off on a criminal investigation into suspected abuse of the freedom of expression to incite to violence. Ohana had asked that the regulation be canceled in light of the growing incitement against Netanyahu and his family on social media.
“Recently, it seems as if you have been acting like someone with a personal vendetta against the prime minister, in the sense of ‘it’s him or me,’ as seen in a series of decisions, such as your intervention in preventing the prime minister from receiving [public] funding for the costs of the trial you forced upon him, despite you having an inherent conflict of interest as the accuser and prosecutor who is seeking to convict him,” wrote Ohana.
