Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer is an expert in criminal and military law, the vice president of the Israel Democracy Institute and head of a major project tracking government corruption in Israel. He served as chairman of the board of directors of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and as president of the Israel Press Council and was named a "champion of quality government." In 2008, he served as head of the organizing committee of the New Movement, which ran on a joint ticket with Meretz for the 18th Knesset.
This past weekend, Kremnitzer published an article in Haaretz excoriating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not only did his merciful and justice-seeking heart not give an ounce of space for pity toward a public servant who might have sinned or allow for the slim chance that Netanyahu might possibly be innocent – he also criticized Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit for "going easy" on the prime minister by planning to charge him with breach of trust in Cases 1,000 and 2,000, when he should have been preparing a charge of bribery. Kremnitzer should be reminded that a pre-indictment hearing has not yet been held, much less a trial, and we have not yet heard or read his defense or the witnesses on his behalf.
Netanyahu has come under harsh criticism for his last speech, in which he attacked senior members of the State Attorney's Office and accused them of being politically biased against him. Naturally, Kremnitzer would have joined the chorus of outrage and even turned up the volume, because a champion of quality government and a hunter down of corruption is permitted to do what a prime minister who is fighting for his good name, and effectively his life, is not.
A while back, a survey was conducted in the U.S. that looked into the political leanings of American academics. It turned out that the vast majority leaned left. In many departments, there were nearly no representatives of a right-wing worldview (which in the U.S. is called "conservative"). The truth is that reading the articles published in the fields of social sciences, humanities, and the law is enough to show which way the wind is blowing.
The problem isn't only the lack of variety in the worldviews represented, but also how that lack influences attempts to discover the truth. It turns out that an advanced degree is not proof against a dogmatic, shallow perception of a complex sociological reality.
Personally, I haven't attended sociology conferences for some time, because there is a general sense of showing up to a closed, homogeneous, and condescending political club rather than an intellectual atmosphere of mutual enrichment that leads to in-depth, unpretending analysis. If that can happen to researchers, why couldn't it happen to legal scholars? No one is completely resistant to political or other types of bias, and that includes lawyers, legal counsels, law professors, and judges.
We all filter our judgment – particularly in matters of justice and morality – through our values, our goals, our sensitivities, and even our personal experience. Anyone who skims through social media will soon find that the posters' various responses to the Netanyahu affair (including about whether indictments should be issued at all; the severity of the alleged acts; the fairness of the future trial; and the chances he will be convicted) are highly correlated with their own political views. Those who hate the prime minister are convinced that he is slime, deserving of serious punishment, even without having looked closely at the attorney general's announcement, and vice versa.
It appears as if the Pavlovian speech with which Kremnitzer rushed to condemn Netanyahu confirms the belief in a situation (at least hypothetical) of political bias against the prime minister, even if unconscious. It is definitely possible that Netanyahu should have been more careful and moderate in his criticism of the state attorney and his staff; nevertheless, he is the prime minister, after all. But the criticism itself is not only undemocratic; it is part of the essence of democracy. Every person has the right to claim they were targeted or persecuted, even if that claim is aimed at the watchdogs themselves.
Kremnitzer is a professor, and anyone familiar with the world of academia knows that the corruption people look for in politics (and that's a good thing) is nothing compared to the corruption that exists in the ivory tower, which is spreading like a plague precisely because the righteous outrage of the champions of the rule of law is always turned outward, never at themselves.
