MKs drag Netanyahu immunity question to Knesset floor
V THE KNESSET, though dissolved for the election, is expected to convene again next week in an unprecedented session to begin hearings on Benjamin Netanyahu.
The session had originally been called at the prime minister’s request two weeks ago, at the very last moment he could do so by law, in a calculated move to delay legal proceedings against him until the end of March.
Mr Netanyahu had assumed his request would not be heard until after the March 2 election because members had not been appointed to the Knesset Committee, the body that hears MKs’ requests for immunity. This, he believed, would prevent the indictments against him overshadowing the election campaign.
But opposition parties, which control a majority of Knesset seats, moved against that plan by agreeing to take whatever legal means necessary to carry the proceedings forward immediately.
Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein initially attempted to block their move, but he was overruled by the chamber’s legal counsel Eyal Yinon, who said that by law a new committee to hear Mr Netanyahu’s case could be appointed — even though the Knesset itself is not formally sitting.
That decision was taken on Monday at a meeting of the Arrangements Committee, a separate body that rules on procedural matters when the Knesset is not sitting. Led by its chair, the Blue & White MK Avi Nissenkorn, a majority of MKs voted on Monday to appoint a new Knesset Committee, while Likud MKs stormed out of the session.
Likud whip Mickey Zohar accused the opposition of turning the proceeding in to “a political circus”. But when he was chairing the committee last September, a week before the previous election, he himself had tried to push through controversial last-minute changes to the electoral law.
In order for a Knesset Committee to begin work, the entire Knesset plenum must be convened and vote to appoint it. Mr Netanyahu and the leaders of other right-wing parties signed a letter on Monday asking Mr Edelstein asking him to use his powers as speaker to prevent this.
But since Knesset procedures allow 25 MKs to request to hold a session, the speaker is loath to block them, even though he is publicly opposed to the move as well.
On Wednesday night it was still not clear whether Mr Edelstein would bow to the demands from the prime minister and his partners and refuse to convene the Knesset. If he does, the opposition is set to replace him by calling a vote for a new speaker.
Meanwhile, sources close to Mr Netanyahu began a briefing war against the speaker, attacking him for “stabbing Netanyahu in the back with a poisonous life” and calling him “son of a priest”. The latter remark is a reference to his background: Mr Edelstein, who has a Jewish mother and was imprisoned by the Soviet Union in the 1980s for teaching Hebrew, is indeed also the son of a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Mr Netanyahu has not yet decided how to continue fighting the immunity procedure, which is of his own making.
Some of his political allies believe he should continue opposing the hearings with High Court petitions and, once they begin, demand to summon dozens of witnesses to obstruct the proceedings and make them in to a show-trial which he can frame as a “witch-hunt” against him.
But his legal and campaign advisors believe that it is unlikely that the proceedings will be over before the election in two months, and it would serve him better to keep a lower profile on the matter.