He must make fateful decisions that impact the entire public. “He needs to make crucial decisions, you can’t involve him nearly every day with investigations”.
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Transgressions now listed in the law as carrying a six-month prison sentence – and which would, therefore, under Amsalem’s proposal, not require a police investigation if committed by a prime minister – include selling alcohol to a minor, placing risky objects in a public place with the intent to cause a disturbance, and willfully allowing a pet to enter and damage a private lawn that has been reseeded in the last 12 months.
That’s why he is proposing a law that would prevent investigators from questioning the Prime Minister in criminal inquiries for infractions that, if he was found guilty, would carry prison sentences of fewer than six months.
Opposition MPs said no citizen should be above the law and pointed out that investigations into the Israeli prime minister required permission from the country’s attorney general in any case, a move created to prevent tendentious inquiries.
“No one in Israel is above the law, not this prime minister, not his predecessors and not those who come after him”, Shai said.
“I don’t know one democratic country in the world in which its prime minister stars in news about investigations and odd and unusual scandals so often”, Amsalem lamented. “No one really believes that the whole world is populated by saints and only Israel has thieves”, he added. “The law already states that investigations of the prime minister and MKs need the Attorney-General’s permission, so there’s no concern of fake investigations”, she pointed out. And if a full-blown criminal investigation were opened, it wouldn’t be the first probe of a sitting prime minister or prominent public official.
According to Amsalem, the bill is necessary because the prime minister’s time is too valuable to deal with “minor issues”.
Itzik Shmuli, from the centre-left Zionist Union called the bill “a new standard of disrespect for the public and harm to the rule of law”. A Likud party spokesman said it had not been coordinated with Netanyahu’s office. The Likud has crossed a line today, with a recommendation that Israel become a monarchy.
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