Tuesday, November 25, 2025
From Ian:
Gadi Taub: The Viral ‘Prison Rape’ That Never Happened
Gadi Taub: The Viral ‘Prison Rape’ That Never Happened
Many unanswered questions remain: While the court probably did not know it was being lied to, why did it accept arguments that were clearly implausible? Why did AG Baharav-Miara not order the arrest of Tomer-Yerushalmi or the confiscation of her phone and her computer immediately after she tendered her resignation? Did she not realize that Tomer-Yerushalmi, who had already done so much to cover her tracks, could use that time to destroy evidence and potentially coordinate testimonies? Baharav-Miara herself will be at least a witness, if not a suspect, in the case. Yet she still refused to recuse herself from overseeing the investigation into Tomer-Yerushalmi, and snubbed the Knesset’s joint session of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, before which she was summoned to appear.300 pack London launch as UK Israel Alliance debuts with Douglas Murray conversation
All this prompted Justice Minister Yariv Levin, author of the now-defunct judicial reform, to announce that Baharav-Miara would be barred from the investigation. Her office retorted that the minister had no authority to bar her. To which Levin responded by appointing a special prosecutor—an institution hitherto unknown in Israel. This was a major vindication for Levin: The entire episode—the cover-up, the lack of transparency, the illicit intimacy between law enforcement and the judiciary (over which Israel has no oversight agencies), and the collective contempt for the normal legal process when these agencies investigate themselves—convincingly showed why his controversial legal reforms were necessary.
But Baharav-Miara was not about to relinquish control of the investigation in which she and her subordinates have been implicated, ever since she defended Tomer-Yerushalmi in court. The matter reached the Supreme Court, which decided to bar Baharav-Miara from overseeing the investigation. The judges were clearly not happy to discover they had been lied to by the people whose good name they were helping to protect. Although it ruled against Levin’s special prosecutor based on a technicality, the court authorized him to appoint another (however, it suspended the new appointment last Thursday, to Levin’s understandable chagrin).
When a prosecutor is finally agreed on, it is not clear whether the investigation will manage to get to the bottom of the affair—especially the involvement of Baharav-Miara and her allies in Israel’s various bureaucracies. Nevertheless, the foundations of Israel’s juristocracy have been shaken. Rifts have opened among the various branches of what the Israeli right calls the “deep state.”
Three other dramatic events also recently transpired: Tomer-Yerushalmi was hospitalized after overdosing on medication while under house arrest, in what appeared to be an attempted suicide. One of the Force 100 soldiers, with a distinguished career in combat service, suffered a heart attack. And the president of the military court has recommended that the IDF prosecution accept the request of the defense to halt all proceedings against the Force 100 accused soldiers—now that the alleged victim is no longer in Israeli custody.
There’s also a cultural aspect without which it is difficult to make sense of all this. Israel’s contemporary elites look at the masses with contempt, viewing them as deplorables. In the eyes of these elites and the mainstream press, the riot in Sde Teiman was an attack on the rule of law, which Tomer-Yerushalmi upheld. Here were the right-wing proto-fascists wielding their pitchforks against the gatekeepers of impartial justice. In this view, the Force 100 soldiers and the rioters belonged to the same crowd of tribal ethno-nationalists who share a common contempt for liberal values and human rights. The right saw it very differently: Unpatriotic globalist progressive elites were weaponizing the law in the middle of a war to show the world they are better than the rest of us. Indeed, Israel’s progressive elites have come to define themselves in opposition to those mostly non-Ashkenazi masses, whom they view as too Jewish, too provincial, and too nationalistic.
Tomer-Yerushalmi may argue that her leak was in the wider public interest: to show international jurists that Israel is willing to use force to apprehend its own soldiers and thereby deny international tribunals a legal reason to intervene. Implausible as it seems to most of us, she may well have believed that throwing Force 100 under the bus was a convincing demonstration of Israel’s high-minded moral standards.
Yet it seems that in this case, as in others, identity trumps ideology. To imagine themselves as members of the enlightened global elite, Israeli progressives must define themselves against the Israel that “right-thinking” people abhor. The beautiful people of Spain or the Netherlands or Berkeley, California, don’t particularly care what the facts of Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors are or whether the Israel they have constructed through sloganeering about “colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” is real or a malevolent fiction. Expressing their abhorrence of a brutal rape that never happened in Sde Teiman was an opportunity for Israel’s elites to show whose side they were on: their fellow elites or the deplorables. Nothing about their choice should be surprising.
Around 300 people attended the launch of the UK Israel Alliance (UKIA) in Central London last week, as the organisation – formerly UK Israel Future Projects – unveiled its new name and mission with a headline conversation featuring author and commentator Douglas Murray.Nas Daily: I’m determined to show the real Israel
Interviewed on stage by Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, Murray reflected on reporting from Israel and Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October atrocities, the regional shifts shaped by the Abraham Accords, and the challenges and opportunities facing pro-Israel advocacy in Britain.
The evening opened with tributes from committee members Bernard Shapero and Sir William Shawcross to the late Martin Green, the 92-year-old founder of UK Israel Future Projects, remembered as a committed Zionist and a pillar of the UK pro-Israel community.
Guests included cross-party parliamentarians from both Houses, diplomats, journalists and long-standing supporters of the group. UKIA says its rebrand signals a renewed commitment to strengthening UK-Israel ties by bringing together activists and thought-leaders “from all political, religious and ethnic backgrounds”.
Chaired by Lord Bew, UKIA’s multi-faith committee includes Sir William Shawcross, Tim Vince, Simon Marks, Bernard Shapero and Dr Efrat Sopher. The organisation plans a rolling series of public events with international speakers addressing key issues affecting both countries.
Lord Bew said the launch demonstrated “the depth of support for Israel outside the Jewish community”, adding: “UKIA’s duty is to proactively reach Brits from all walks of life and proudly celebrate the fact that our two countries are stronger together. Israel has been subjected to an appalling smear campaign, but it is abundantly clear that many Brits cherish the shared values our great countries stand for.”
Israeli-Arab influencer Nuseir Yassin has described his mission to “show the Israel I want and like” and insisted he was now more hopeful about the future Middle East than at any time.Oscar-winning filmmaker moves to Israel and trains his lens on October 7 survivors
Known to 68 million social media followers as Nas Daily for his videos chronicling the lives of people in far-flung corners of the globe, he addressed more than 400 guests at Magen David Adom’s annual dinner last night.
In conversation with broadcaster Rob Rinder, he described how he left a safe job in tech almost a decade ago to create videos showing the “exact opposite” of the stories that tend to dominate discourse around the Middle East. Or, as Rinder put it, to “turn the toxicity of social media into something positive”.
“Twenty percent of Israel is Arab,” he said. “One force says you’re Palestinian and you shouldn’t have anything to do with Israel. Another force says we need to share the land and build up the land together. To escape the first force is hard. To call myself Israeli means I love Israel. It means freedom of speech. It’s the work that organisations like MDA are trying to do. This is what we should all be trying to promote, whatever the cost.”
“The most controversial topic in the world today is Israel and Palestine. Each time you talk about it, you pay a price. But you’ve got to humanise Israelis and Jewish people around the world and humanise Arabs as well. If you get to know someone, it’s very hard to hate them.”
He describes this as the safest time to land in Tel Aviv and paints a picture of a time when you could have lunch in Beirut, dinner in Damascus and then head back to Jerusalem in one taxi ride.
As for the two million Israeli Arabs within Israel, he said, they had a decision to make after the horrors of 7 October. “I think a large proportion have decided – including me – that we belong in Israel,” the former Harvard student told the audience. “That is the shock it takes to be able to see clearly. We don’t want to live under a Palestinian or Jordanian government. Despite the hardships, we are all Israelis.”
Oscar-winning filmmaker Richard Trank has been making documentaries about Israel for decades. Today, he finally lives here.
“I wish I had made this decision earlier,” Trank told The Times of Israel about his aliyah to Israel last month, after a lifetime living and working in Los Angeles. “But I can’t change that.”
One of the first films Trank is working on under his brand-new production company, Sea Point Films and Media, aims to tell the story of Israelis recovering from the October 7 attacks and their rehabilitation journeys.
“I started thinking about really a post-October 7 project, because we all know what happened on October 7. We’ve all heard the stories, and it’s important to tell those stories,” Trank said during a recent video interview from his new home in Herzliya. “But I started thinking about, how do you come out of that? How do you rebuild your life?”
That film, titled “The Road Home,” is part of a fresh start for Trank, who spent more than 40 years at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, spearheading its Moriah Films production branch, helping to create an impressive slate of award-winning documentary films on Jewish and Israeli themes.
Trank left the Wiesenthal Center at the beginning of this year, around a year after its founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, retired from the helm.
“At the end of 2023, new leadership came in, and they made a decision to move Moriah into a different direction, away from documentaries,” Trank said. “And there really wasn’t a place for me.”
The departure marks a major shift for Trank, who wrote and directed 16 documentary films for Moriah, telling stories of Jewish and Israeli life and working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. His most recent film, “Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres” – narrated by George Clooney – is currently streaming on Netflix.
Prior to that, he adapted Yehuda Avner’s book “The Prime Ministers” into a series of two films that included Sandra Bullock, Michael Douglas, and Christoph Waltz, in voice acting roles. Trank’s film on Theodor Herzl was narrated by Ben Kingsley, and past documentaries also featured Nicole Kidman, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, and Morgan Freeman.
The last project he completed before leaving the Wiesenthal Center was a long-in-the-making documentary about David Ben Gurion, narrated by Julianna Margulies, which has yet to be released by Moriah.
“It’s really up to Wiesenthal about what they ultimately do with that film,” said Trank. “But I’m proud of it.”
Trank won the Academy Award for best documentary for co-producing 1997’s “The Long Way Home,” about the journeys of Holocaust survivors in the aftermath of World War II.
In many ways, he said, “The Road Home” — exploring the journey of October 7 survivors — mirrors that film’s exploration of how Holocaust survivors started over and rebuilt their lives in the wake of World War II.
.jpg)
Buy 
.png)
.jpeg)
