Abuse by Israeli soldiers

Yes. I was reading about this. They are going all out to make out that rape never happened so an important step is to punish her instead of the rapists.

Yes of course this is being spun in this way by Netanyahu: their government has spent its entire 3 years trying to delegitimise the judiciary and this is just another example.

As for other Western democracies - unfortunately there are plenty of parallels: Abu Ghraib; systematic abuse of Iraqi detainees by British forces in Iraq www.ecchr.eu/en/case/war-crimes-by-uk-forces-in-iraq/

This is why this is such a shocking case: the only hope against cases like these is a strong judiciary that will punish the perpetrators, and the fact that the chief military prosecutor acted outside the law - even for the "right reasons" releasing the video - undermines the prevention of future abuses.

I can fully understand concerns that she lied to the court - but the way it’s spun by Netanyahu’s government is that the leak itself was a « PR attack » on Israel.

I would have thought the biggest PR attack was that the alleged violence happened in the first place!

The lie by a senior lawyer was bad, but it doesn’t come close to the horror of the alleged physical assaults by 5 Israelis on an innocent Palestinian that happened in a state facility. I simply cannot imagine this happening in a prison of a western democracy.

www.timesofisrael.com/pm-palestinian-prisoner-abuse-video-leak-most-serious-pr-attack-against-israel-to-date/

There are plenty of sources which will give a much fuller account than me, but basically; Netanyahu formed a coalition government with far right parties that represent the extremists of the settler movement. He needs them to remain in his government to survive. Ben Gvir, the leader of far-right party Otzma Yehudit is the internal security minister, and he has done everything in his power to protect violent Jewish extremists in the West Bank. I personally know some left wing Israeli Jews who go to support those harvesting olives in the West Bank but it's a drop in the ocean against violent extremists and a police force which is deliberately being held back rom investigating them.

Where is the outrage in Israel when settlers routinely cut down and burn olive trees? Which is the source of livelihood for Palestinian farmers?

Israel loses it's legitimacy as a 'democracy' when they have settlers running rampage daily against innocent Palestinians who are rarely held accountable.

@israelilefty whilst you are on the thread and mention you are Israeli - can I ask please why the government does nothing about the daily settler attacks against Palestinians who are trying to harvest olives. Why are the IDF also complicit in these attacks by either partaking or standing by and watching?

This has been extensively discussed in another thread. As I said there - this news article is misleading. She was not arrested simply for the leak of the video (and at the time the video was leaked, this abuse story was well known and had caused outcry in the Israeli public sphere; the soldiers involved were arrested). The more serious part of the story in legal terms, and why she was arrested now, is obstruction of justice. It is a very complicated case, but in short: when the abuse case happened, there were far right protests against the arrest of the soldiers concerned, including attempts to discredit the justice system. According to her own letter of resignation, Tomer-Yerushalmi decided to leak the security camera footage to Channel 12 News in order to protect the justice system from far-right accusations that soldiers from Sde Teiman were being arrested with no basis. However, her office later covered up the leak, claiming in an affidavit to the Supreme Court that the source of the leak could not be traced. This was done with the knowledge of several people in the legal system; there also seems to have been an attempt to destroy evidence (she is believed to have thrown her phone into the sea). All this is why she was arrested now: despite Bibi's spin, it's not because she uncovered abuse that was hidden - it was already a very well known and widely reported case.