Tali Gotliv walked into that hearing not as a defendant begging for mercy, but as an elected member of Knesset accusing Israel’s legal and security establishment of moral collapse, selective enforcement, and institutional cowardice. And that is exactly why they are so determined to break her. They do not fear her style nearly as much as they fear what her style allows her to do: say plainly, aggressively, and without apology what a large part of the national camp believes about the October 7 disaster, the Shin Bet, the prosecution, and the attorney general’s office. The hearing on her immunity request took place this week even as Israel remained under emergency pressure from Iran, and the attorney general herself appeared before the committee to argue that the indictment concerns one thing only: Gotliv’s exposure of the identity of a Shin Bet employee. 

But that is precisely the point: Gotliv came to say that the system is lying when it pretends this is only about one technical disclosure. In the hearing, as reported by multiple outlets, she did not speak like someone discussing a narrow criminal file. She spoke like someone convinced that the legal system, the prosecution, and parts of the security establishment have spent years protecting themselves, shielding one another, and pursuing political enemies while evading responsibility for their own failures. She accused the attorney general and State Attorney Amit Aisman of behaving like a crime organization, accused the system of whitewashing the Shin Bet after October 7, and argued that the public is watching a legal establishment more interested in preserving its own power than in confronting its own role in the collapse. Those were not polite arguments. They were meant as a frontal assault on legitimacy itself.

And that is exactly why so many are siding with her.

Because whatever one thinks about her tone, the underlying issue she raised is not crazy. The attorney general’s office in Israel is not a minor........

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