Israeli prosecutors are due to decide on whether to prosecute former Prime Minister Ehud Barak on new allegations of incitement and sedition, it emerged on Monday.
Speaking at an anti-government protest rally in Tel Aviv late last month, Barak urged the thousands present to engage in “nonviolent civil noncompliance.”
When Israeli lawmakers return from their summer/High Holiday recess on Oct. 28, “the revolt must be extended to a mass strike around the parliament together with opposition leaders until the government falls,” he told the crowd.
Authorities told the Israeli human-rights organization B’tsalmo, which filed the complaint against Barak, that an investigation file was opened with the Tel Aviv police.
“The authority to order the opening of an investigation into the crimes of incitement and sedition rests with the Department for Special Tasks in the State Attorney’s Office. After the police examine the case, it will be forwarded for review and a decision by the deputy state prosecutor for special tasks at the State Attorney’s Office,” the police wrote to B’tsalmo.
Shai Glick, CEO of B’tslamo, said, “The existing reality in which left-wing people repeatedly incite and riot while they aren’t even called in for questioning, while right-wing people have been sent to prison for much lesser things, is delusional and shows selective enforcement.
“We demand that the State Attorney’s Office immediately order that an indictment be filed against Ehud Barak,” Glick said.
Last year, police also investigated Barak’s calls for encouraging civil unrest to block Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s now-shelved judicial reforms.
Barak, a leading voice against the judicial reform program, urged Israelis to engage in “civil disobedience, or in more precise language, nonviolent civil disobedience,” during a June 2023 speech in Haifa.
Barak, who once led Israel’s Labor Party, served as the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff from 1991 to 1995. He was also a defense minister in governments led by Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert.
In February of this year, Barak called on the Israeli public to “besiege” parliament in Jerusalem to force early elections and bring down Netanyahu.
The former premier told Army Radio that “30,000 citizens need to camp outside the Knesset in tents for three weeks, day and night,” until “the country shuts down [and] Netanyahu realizes that his time is up.”
Barak called for demonstrators to “separate from the [anti-judicial reform] protest movement” and declared that elections “must not wait” until after the war with the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza.
