No Guardian for the Gatekeepers: Isaac Amit Buried the Sde Teiman Affair | Moshe Cohen-Eliya

Judge Isaac Amit, who was appointed in a controversial process to the position of President of the Supreme Court, buried one of the most serious affairs in the history of Israeli juristocracy: the affair of the leaked video from Sde Teiman, which presented IDF soldiers to the world as having committed a serious sexual act against a security detainee.

The video was distributed worldwide and received enormous exposure, and was even used in publications and reports by UN bodies dealing with allegations of sexual violence against Palestinian detainees. The reputational damage to Israel and the soldiers was enormous. Guy Peleg and Channel 12 News presented the video as one that "includes documentation of the offense attributed to the reservists - sodomy under aggravating circumstances," even though the alleged act is not clearly visible in the video. A libel lawsuit for about 1.5 million shekels has already been filed against Peleg and Channel 12 News, and in March of this year, the indictment against the five soldiers was dismissed due to the accumulation of evidentiary difficulties, violation of due process, and abnormal conduct by officials in the Military Advocate General's Office.

When the Military Advocate General admitted that she was the one who approved the leak of the video, it was an earthquake for the Israeli juristocracy. Institutionally, her fall could have also led to severe damage to Gali Baharav-Miara, who has acted over the years to protect the current power structure in Israel, and among other things, also Amit. In the affair itself, a position was submitted to the High Court of Justice on behalf of the State based on an internal check according to which the source of the leak was not located; later it turned out that the Military Advocate General herself approved it. From here, the serious suspicion of false reporting to the High Court of Justice was also born.

To understand Amit's move to whitewash the affair, one must return to November 2025. The panel of Yael Willner, Alex Stein, and Gila Canfi-Steinitz determined in the Buaron matter that in the exceptional circumstances of the affair, there is a real difficulty in entrusting the supervision of the investigation to senior officials of the Attorney General's Office or senior officials of the State Attorney's Office. Senior officials in these systems were previously involved in supervising the check intended to locate the source of the leak. The court determined that in such an exceptional situation, the Minister of Justice is authorized to exercise Section 23a(d) of the State Service Law and transfer the supervisory authority to another body.

And then began the ordeal of Minister of Justice Yariv Levin to appoint a public servant who could meet the strict conditions set for the appointment in the Buaron ruling. Levin first appointed retired judge Asher Cola. The High Court of Justice determined that Cola essentially meets the conditions, but disqualified the appointment due to the legal provision prohibiting the Ombudsman for the Judiciary from engaging in additional employment. Levin therefore moved to the next candidate: retired judge Yosef Ben-Hamo.

And this is the stage where Amit entered the center of the arena to steer the result in the direction desired for him: burying the affair and canceling the Buaron ruling itself. First, as a single judge within the framework of the additional hearing proceedings, he froze the appointment of Ben-Hamo for reasons of "preserving the status quo." Later, in the panel of Amit, Willner, and Kabub, Ben-Hamo was also disqualified, because he did not meet the condition set by the Buaron ruling that the supervising body must be a senior civil servant; his temporary absorption into the state service for the purpose of the position was not enough.

Immediately after that, Amit took the most important principled step: he accepted the requests for an additional hearing from the Movement for Democracy and the State Attorney's Office, and scheduled a hearing before all 11 Supreme Court judges on two questions concerning the heart of the Buaron ruling: the Minister's authority under Section 23a(d), and the scope of a sweeping or systemic conflict of interest. The Buaron ruling is still formally alive, but Amit opened the door to re-examining its foundations.

The very approval of the additional hearing is a significant indicator. A study by Prof. Yonatan Givati and Israel Rosenberg found that the judge who accepts a request for an additional hearing votes against the result of the original ruling in 87% of cases, compared to 65% among the other judges joining the panel. Therefore, Amit's decision does not prove in advance how he will vote, but it certainly teaches, with a high degree of probability, which way the wind is blowing.

And this week we received a preview. The Legal Advisor to the Ministry of Justice, Yael Kotik, determined that although Baharav-Miara's recusal remains in place, the recusal of State Attorney Amit Aisman was removed following the development of the investigation. The petition reached the panel of Amit, Kabub, and Mintz. Again, Amit engineered the panel so that he has an automatic majority: Kabub almost always joins him, and he is part of the hyper-activist camp in the Supreme Court, while Mintz, the more conservative one, is there as a fig leaf; a kind of substitute for Solberg. And of course, that is exactly what happened: Amit and Kabub were the majority, Mintz remained in the minority.

Amit and Kabub refused to intervene in Kotik's opinion. While Mintz pointed exactly to the problem: how can one rely on the results of the investigation to remove the recusal when the same external body that the Buaron ruling sought to place above the investigation was never appointed? Mintz actually wrote that as long as the Buaron ruling was not implemented through external supervision, it cannot be said that the factual infrastructure was "updated" in a way that allows the recusal to be removed. Otherwise, he wrote, the Buaron ruling would be "emptied of all content."

And so Amit acted to bury the Buaron ruling in two ways. In the concrete case, he allows the file to be returned to the State Attorney's Office without the external supervision that the original ruling determined ever taking place. And on the principled level, he opened in an additional hearing the very recognition of the Minister's authority and institutional conflict of interest, and thereby created the possibility to narrow or overturn the precedent for the future as well.

And one must pay attention to the institutional relationship between Amit and Baharav-Miara. Investigative bodies previously determined that there is no basis for opening a criminal investigation against Amit, and later Baharav-Miara determined that the disciplinary complaint that Levin sought to promote against him lacks factual basis and legal validity. On the other hand, Amit stands at the head of the court that decides again and again on issues concerning her status and power. There is no proof of any deal in this itself. But the accumulation of things creates a difficult institutional trust problem.

Isaac Amit is emerging as the most aggressive president in the struggle to preserve the old power structure. In my eyes, he is institutionally corrupting the Supreme Court: using procedural tools and legal interpretation in a way that protects again and again a power system that believes its independence precedes its responsibility.

The Buaron ruling was born from a simple principle: even the gatekeepers need a gatekeeper. Its burial, if completed in the additional hearing, will say the opposite: that in Israel there are institutions that are allowed to supervise everyone, but are not allowed to be truly supervised themselves.

Prof. Moshe Cohen-Eliya is an expert in constitutional law, and he is the founder of "Masad HaAretz - The Research Institute of the People of Israel."