Caroline’s guest on “The Caroline Glick Show” this week was Professor Avi Bell.
They began their discussion with a brief analysis of the U.S. State Department’s decision to boycott Jewish Israeli scientific institutions in Judea and Samaria, reversing the policy instituted by the Trump administration. Without written guidance, the legal justification for the a priori discriminatory treatment of Jews in Judea and Samaria is unknowable. Bell likened the move to a previous move by the European Union to boycott Israeli Jews and Jewish institutions in Judea, Samaria, unified Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The European Union strong-armed Israel into signing a scientific cooperation deal that accepted this discriminatory treatment of Jews.
The bulk of their conversation related to the recent developments in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial. Bell was a member of a team of senior American jurists who appeared before then-Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit in his pre-indictment hearing for Netanyahu. Bell and his associates explained to Mandelblit that there were no precedents in democratic nations for his decision to expand the definition of bribery to include the provision of positive coverage of a politician by a news outlet. Mandelblit opted to ignore their testimony and so transformed the rule of law in Israel into the rule of lawyers who bend statutes and invent crimes as a means to oust politicians they oppose from office.
Bell welcomed the trial judges’ statement last week that the prosecution has not proved its charge of bribery. But he argued that so long as the court continues to accept the legitimacy of the prosecution’s claim that political-media relations are a criminal syndicate, Netanyahu will remain in jeopardy and the legal system in Israel will remain corrupt.
In the final portion of the discussion, Glick and Bell turned their attention to the government’s effort to reform the legal system and the necessity of altering the judicial selection process. Bell explained that so long as there isn’t a fundamental change in the judicial selection process, any specific reform passed will be written on water. It will not survive judicial review.
Don’t miss this discussion. You won’t get this information anywhere else.
