In February 2026, three senior figures hailing from different professional and ideological backgrounds submitted a joint letter of resignation to the Minister of Justice: retired Judge Moshe Drori, former National Public Defender Adv. Inbal Rubinstein, and former ISA (Shin Bet) division head Shalom Ben Hanan. They had served for two and a half years on the investigative committee (The Drori Commission) established to investigate the use of spyware (such as Pegasus) by law enforcement agencies against citizens, and specifically whether unlawfully obtained surveillance material had been fed into pending criminal cases.
The Attorney General opposed the Commission even before it’s establishment, and joined a petition filed against it in the Supreme Court. In February 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that the Commission was not permitted to deal with pending cases; that is, precisely those cases in which the spyware had been used, chief among them the cases against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For two years, the police and the State Attorney’s Office, under the Attorney General’s guidance, refused to provide the Commission with the materials it had requested, including general documents unrelated to any specific case. In parallel, the State Attorney’s Office filed twenty-three (!) consecutive requests for extensions to submit its response to the petition – citing workload, holidays, personal circumstances, pending approvals, yet another round of approvals – thus leaving the question of the Commission’s jurisdiction unresolved, and effectively paralyzing its work. Finally, the Supreme Court allowed the very bodies under investigation to determine what the Commission would and would not be permitted to examine. The day after that decision the Commission resigned.
What the Commission failed to achieve, and will now never get to, is mapping out the network involved: who authorized the operations, who handled the intelligence products, and who transferred them – if they were transferred – to the investigations. The network’s threads were cut before anyone could tease them apart.
Most readers mistook this affair as simply another bureaucratic failure. But two other recent affairs – different from both each other and the spyware case – ended at precisely the same point in their investigation.
The first is the affair of Assaf Shmulevitz. On October 7, 2023, Adv. Assaf Shmulevitz, a civilian who had not been called up for reserve duty, arrived at the Southern Command headquarters. He presented himself as an officer in a special unit, and for a whole week attended highly classified briefings, and documented sensitive materials. His defense attorneys argued on the record that he had received letters of appointment from senior figures in the Southern Command. Neither the identity of these figures nor the basis for these letters of appointment was made public.
In March 2026, the District Court acquitted Shmulevitz on grounds of insanity, after three psychiatric evaluations. But even if his mental state exempts him from criminal liability, it does not exempt the system from its obligation to investigate who opened doors for him, and where the materials he documented ended up. The indictment itself described Shmulevitz meeting with various parties whose details were redacted, ostensibly for reasons of state security. The ISA merely issued a laconic statement that the materials had not been passed on “to hostile elements”. To whom were they passed, and through what channels was not published. The threads were cut.
The third case is more serious and more widely known. In July 2024, nine reserve combat soldiers were arrested on suspicion of abusing a detained terrorist at the Sde Teiman detention facility. The video of the alleged incident was broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12. For twelve months, the Military Advocate General’s office claimed to be searching for the leaker, supervised by the civilian State Attorney’s Office. In September 2025, an affidavit was submitted to the Supreme Court stating that the investigation had been “exhausted” and it was impossible to identify who leaked the information.
A month later, a routine ISA polygraph examination of the Military Advocate General’s spokesperson, conducted in the context of a promotion request, revealed that the Military Advocate General herself, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, had been behind the leak, and that it had been coordinated in a WhatsApp group of senior officers in the Military Advocate General’s Corps.
The affidavit had been inaccurate, to put it mildly. The investigation that had led to it had been conducted by the office of the leaker herself, under the supervision of the office that signed off on it. The questions of who received the leak outside the Military Advocate General’s Corps, whether additional parties were involved, and in particular – which officials from the prosecution took part in it remain unanswered. Once again, the threads were cut.
Defenders of the system might argue that the system did work – after all, the Military Advocate General was caught. Such an argument ignores the timeline: On 30 September 2025, the State Attorney’s Office declared that the investigation was exhausted, and its affidavit was presented to the Court. The truth was revealed through a completely external procedure: a polygraph conducted by a different body for a different purpose. An actor from outside the investigation inadvertently came across a piece of evidence that was contrary to the conclusion that the internal investigation could go no further.
Three separate cases – one shared issue. Every investigation has stages: what happened, who did what, and who else was involved – the operators, the recipients, the coordinators. The final stage is the one where an affair is established as a story about a network rather than about individuals. In all three cases, the investigation stopped precisely before that point was reached. These three cases are not identical, but after accounting for their differences, the resemblance that remains is both structural and unmistakable: in each one, a visible actor was identified, while those who supplied, brokered, and coordinated the affair were left unmapped.
Why were the investigations called off at that stage in particular? Because the nature of a specific act can be disputed; a chain of connections is far harder to argue away. Anyone confident in the honesty of their actions has no reason to fear exposure. Someone who does, or who has an asset upstream to protect, will do everything possible to stop things at that point. When the same choice recurs over and again, it is no longer a malfunction. It is a clue to what someone is trying to keep in the shadows.
This also explains why the names of the low-level players matter so much, even when the major figures already seem to be known. In a healthy legal system, the “small fry” serve as the fuel of an investigation. A mid-ranking official who sent a message, drafted an affidavit, opened a door, etc. either goes down alone or turns state’s witness. A state’s witness from within the system is usually the practical path to prosecuting those above them in the food chain. A system that cannot find the middle-tier figures is a system that has decided to avoid reaching anyone from the higher ranks.
And not only in terms of criminal liability. There is a difference between “people with similar views” and “coordinated behavior”. Two senior officials dining together proves nothing. However, a chain of messages from a prosecutor’s aide to the Military Advocate General ‘s spokesperson to a Channel 12 reporter to a figure in the protest movement and back to another aide in the prosecutor’s office – all within 48 hours of an incident – makes it considerably harder to argue that this is a mere sociological coincidence. Coordination between formally separate institutions requires people who move between those institutions. Once these people are named, the institutions cease to appear independent.
Judge Drori himself put it succinctly after his resignation: the bodies under investigation were permitted to determine what the Commission investigating them would be allowed to investigate. If the argument up to this point is accepted, it is hard not to hear in his words a fairly accurate description of the other two affairs as well.
But those same institutions do know perfectly well how to do what was not done in these affairs. The Qatar-gate story is proof of that. In the same years during which the leaker in the Military Advocate General’s office was not identified, the chain of authorizations in the spyware affair was not exposed, and the recipients of Shmulevitz’s material were not pursued – those same institutions produced a detailed forensic map of an alleged foreign influence operation. Intermediaries were named. WhatsApp threads were reconstructed in detail. International cooperation was pursued. Remand orders were extended. Deep device examination was carried out. Arrests were made of senior advisers to the Prime Minister. That is what a thorough investigation looks like when the system decides to see it through.
One could argue that Qatar-gate was investigated with such vigor because of the gravity of the conduct under investigation. Perhaps so. But that misses the point. The question is not whether Qatar-gate was a legitimate investigation; the question is why that same investigative rigor was not applied to the spyware affair, the Shmulevitz case, or at Sde Teiman. The asymmetry rather than one particular case is the forensic evidence. And it is hard to ignore the fact that it maps onto obvious political lines.
The question we face is whether the State of Israel has a legal system that applies the same investigative rigor to all. The public record currently available suggests it does not. And it is worth asking people who are not supporters of the current government whether they are comfortable with such a system wielding such power over governments they prefer.
The standard remedies for institutional failures – independent investigations, external prosecutors, protections for whistleblowers, parallel investigations of how evidence was handled – do exist in our laws. The reason they will be futile here is structural: the institutions that must be investigated are the same ones that have the power to decide what gets investigated. The Drori Comission is proof of that. The classic remedy, duly appointed with investigative powers, was buried by the very institutions it was meant to investigate through twenty-three procedural applications for extension.
As a form of regulatory capture, this is not unique to Israel. Doctors resist external oversight; police resist civilian review. The claim here does not require conspiratorial coordination in a smoky backroom. Coordination grows from a shared worldview, a shared social circle, and a shared professional interest – even without any of the participants grasping the full pattern. What is exceptional in Israel though, is the combination of extreme professional autonomy, the establishment’s ability to use judicial review itself as a tool to block oversight, and sufficient ideological homogeneity for such capture to produce systematic rather than localized protection.
In light of the above, it is easy to understand why so much political energy in Israel is expended in fighting over appointments such as the ISA Director, the Attorney General, the Civil Service Commissioner and others – even to the point of creating constitutional crises. The default public position is to view this as a matter of personal rivalries, who is close to whom and who gets a seat. But such a view misses the essential issue. The point at which the process collapses is precisely the point at which institutions’ insiders are required to investigate their own social and professional circles. In such situations, inserting figures from outside those circles to key positions is not a matter of politics, but a necessary precondition to have someone at the institution who is not invested in preserving the pattern, and for whom dismantling networks is not professional suicide but a mission.
Replacing personnel is not usually the ideal solution, and it is also insufficient on its own. It must be followed by institutional reform such as separating the Department of Internal Police Investigations, appointing a special prosecutor, opening tenders in the State Attorney’s Office, and the like. But both solutions will clash with the very institutions they are meant to fix. There is no way to dodge that struggle.
(First appeared in Hebrew in Makor Rishon)
