Right, so imagine being Israel's top military
lawyer, years spent defending the most moral
army in the world, inverted commas, turning war
crimes into paperwork as that entails, and then
one day realising the paperwork itself has become
the crime. That was Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi. She
leaked the footage from Stey Taiman, soldiers
assaulting a bound Palestinian prisoner. She
was the whistleblower. She resigned. She vanished.
She was found again, and was promptly arrested.
Soldiers, though, out on bail, arguing due process.
The whistleblower treated like a spy, though.
That's Israel's most moral army for you, though,
isn't it? Aside from all of their misconduct
on the battlefield, back at home torture gets
court management, truth gets handcuffs, and the
best part? The system thinks it's proving its
own integrity by prosecuting the only honest
person in uniform. They tried to bury a whistleblower
and instead the state has indicted itself once
more as amoral, bereft of legitimacy, and worthy
crime of speaking out is the worst crime of all.
Right, so Israel's top military lawyer leaked
proof of a war crime committed by her own state
military. How mad a sentence is that at any time,
anywhere? Instead of addressing what is a massive
scandal in any other state, the system she served
came for her instead of for the soldiers. Major
General Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi wasn't some dissident
clerk, she was the head of the army's law machine,
the woman who signed off every operation the
politicians called legal. When she confirmed
she'd leaked the Steve Tayman video, soldiers
surrounding a restrained Palestinian prisoner
and assaulting him, she didn't just break secrecy,
she broke the illusion that the law still ruled.
She resigned last Friday over it, but by Sunday
she'd gone missing. Her car abandoned on a Tel
Aviv beach, a letter at home that made her family
fear the worst. Hours later police said she was
safe, and then they arrested her. The soldiers
stayed free, the lawyer went in cuffs. That's
Israel's moral order laid out in sequence for
you. Ste Tamon isn't a secret anymore. It's a
desert compound where Palestinians are dumped
after raids. Shackled, blindfolded, left unnamed.
It's a place notorious for beatings, medical
neglect and deaths in custody. Physicians for
human rights Israel called it a torture site.
The government called it lawful. The footage
made those denials collapse, though. Nine reservists
questioned, five indicted for severe abuse, but
not for anything more severe than that. Their
lawyers now say the case must be dropped because
the leak hurt the army. The IDF has a hurtie.
Well, you can't put a plaster on a snowflake,
I'm afraid, but that's the defence. Exposure,
not assault, that's the injury. When a state
prosecutes the proof before the crime, you know
what kind of law it's practicing. Israel's leaders
didn't call it cover -up, they called it security.
Defence Minister of the demented Israel Katz
said the leak was a severe violation of discipline.
Far -right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich
said those who leak endanger us all. No -one
promised to close the camp though. The emergency
was the truth. The press followed the cue. Herets
kept to the facts. Search letter to arrest. The
tabloids went for total character assassination.
Unstable under strain. Channel 14 anchors demanded
punishment. Overnight the narrative turned from
torture to gossip about a woman's nerves. As
you erase a scandal in real time you question
the witness. Inside the army panic passed for
discipline. The military advocate general's office
exists to give operations a legal gloss. Once
its chief becomes a defendant though every past
opinion starts to look like a cover note. The
institution that certified the Gaza war as legal
has now indicted its own proof of illegality
and so the contradiction is total. Law and power
can't coexist. One has to serve the other. In
Israel, power won that fight long ago. Of course
what is happening now isn't new. It's all been
done before. Mordecai Vannunu infamously blew
the whistle and showed the world the nuclear
stockpile. Israel still denies that it exists
all the way back in 1986 and he got 18 years,
11 in solitary for that. And at CAM leaked documents
proving illegal assassinations and got four and
a half. Breaking the silence collected soldiers'
testimonies about what they had been up to and
released them, resulting in them being banned
from schools. Every time the pattern held. Crimes
are tolerable, but disclosure isn't. Tomi Erashalmi
knew that pattern and leaked anyway. That is
courage in a country that treats honesty as sabotage,
isn't it? Her family's fear wasn't melodrama
either, therefore it was precedent. In Israel,
telling the truth can end your life as you know
it. When she vanished, people didn't imagine
arrest, they imagined revenge. She came back
alive, but indicted. The law she once defended
now calls her its enemy. The same command that
ignored abuse in the desert now hunts leaks in
the capital. They call it order restored, but
look closer. The order is silence. Every authoritarian
habit Israel denies owning is written into this
case. Secrecy is virtue. Loyalty as morality,
punishment as proof of control. A government
that can't refute evidence redefines it as treason.
That's why her trial has to happen behind closed
doors now, because sunlight is lethal to the
myth. The gender smear was no accident either.
The first woman to run the Advocate General's
office exposes male soldiers for sexual violence
and suddenly she's fragile. The ridicule about
breakdowns and hysteria Wasn't cultural noise,
it was message discipline. Power reasserting
who's allowed to speak for the army. A woman
telling the truth shames the hierarchy twice,
once for the crime, once for needing her to hide
it. Abroad the fallout has begun in the quiet
language diplomats use when they're cornered,
under strain, complicates cooperation. We continue
to monitor. Those phrases mean one thing. The
story's indefensible. Washington and Brussels
built their defence of Israel on robust internal
oversight, but oversight just got arrested, didn't
it? So worm your way out of that one now. The
legal firewall keeping the ICC at bay is crumbling
line by line, warrant by warrant. You can almost
hear the lawyers in the Hague marking her name
as corroboration now. According to media reports,
officers inside Israel's legal corps have begun
conveying decisions verbally instead of recording
them, a change triggered by the Ste Tamon leak.
Military lawyers said the episode sent shockwaves
through the core. In practice, the institution
that once sold moral superiority through self
-investigation now behaves like one afraid of
its own paperwork, guarding not legality but
deniability. The political culture turns the
screw even more. National security has become
a religion with one commandment, thou shalt not
embarrass the army. Everything else, journalism,
law, conscience, is all subordinate. Israeli
commentators on several domestic channels even
suggested she should have been kept under supervision
to prevent further leaks, describing it as protection.
Protection for the state, not for her of course.
Many high -ranking figures don't want her to
open her mouth, the anchors said. No outrage
followed that. In Israel that kind of statement
passes for normal. Abuse of Palestinians can
still be managed through the usual euphemisms
though. Irregularities, disciplinary measures,
isolated incident. But a senior officer defying
the gag is something else. It shows the machine
is cracking from the inside. Her confession turned
a human rights allegation into legal fact. That's
why the reaction had to be swift, had to be public
and punishing. The leak threatened the currency
Israel trades in, moral legitimacy. Without it
every ally's defense falls apart. At the disciplinary
level and at the diplomatic level that's already
happening. The ICC can now argue that Israel's
military justice system isn't independent. The
argument writes itself, doesn't it? When the
head of the system is prosecuted for exposing
abuse, there can clearly be no internal remedy
for that. The jurisdiction door opens. Israel's
allies know it, which is why their statements
have shrunk to murmurs. They can't afford to
acknowledge what this looks like. A democratic
partner under stress, that's how they'll phrase
it until the headlines move on. But the files
will stay open. At home the case deepens to rot.
Legality in Israel now operates like a broadcast
for foreign consumption. Every inquiry is staged
for optics. Every minor conviction offered as
proof that the system still functions. But the
facade has cracked. Tomer Yerushalmi exposed
the gap between what Israel tells the world and
what it does in the dark. The few Israelis who
still believe the law can mean something are
watching institutions that no longer believe
it themselves. Officials going through the motions
of justice while dreading what real justice would
expose. They're terrified of justice in other
words. They're cowards. Snowflakes. Pick your
poison. The army says her prosecution is necessary
to protect national security. What is protecting
is reputation. The phrase security now means
control of narrative. Justice means containment.
Accountability means a press conference. It's
not self -correction. It's self -preservation.
A state that equates exposure with danger. will
always choose ignorance. And that's where Israel
stands now, a country claiming to defend civilisation
by criminalising conscience. The machinery still
works, the moral engines blown itself to bits,
though. What you're seeing now is legality drained
of all meaning, form without function, rules
without conviction. And the advocate general
who proved it has been erased from the very system
she once upheld, treated not as a guardian of
law, but as a threat to its illusion. The deeper
you look, the clearer it gets. This isn't a scandal,
it's an x -ray. You can see the whole structure,
the political spine, the legal muscle, the press
nerves, all tightening around the same reflex.
Protect the image. That's the unspoken law of
Israeli power. The state can absorb atrocity,
but it can't absorb shame. It can't tolerate
that. And what Tomer Yerushalmi leaked was shame
in its purest form, filmed, authenticated and
undeniable. The government's line never changes.
They say these are isolated lapses, that the
moral fabric of the army remains intact. But
a moral fabric that tears every time someone
tells the truth isn't fabric, it's camouflage.
Each case they dismiss as exceptional is proof
of the exceptions of the rule. Steve Tayman was
supposed to be an off -book holding area, a necessary
roughness of war. Instead it became a crime scene.
And the person who said so out loud was the one
who wrote the laws. That's the nightmare for
Israel here. Not that the world might see the
footage, but that Israelis might see what their
law has become. What's the language the press
uses? National trauma, sensitive material, breach
of trust. Every word chosen to suggest confusion
rather than intention. But nothing here is confused.
The soldiers made choices. The government made
choices. The prosecutors now charging the whistleblower
are making choices. The paperwork tells the story
if you read what's missing. No charge of rape,
no instigation into command responsibility, no
protection for the source. Every omission is
a confession. Abroad officials pretend distance.
The White House calls it an internal matter.
The Foreign Office says Israel's legal system
is capable of dealing with it. But capable of
what? Capable of arresting its own conscience?
Certainly. Capable of restoring credibility?
Not a chance. Each line of diplomatic caution
reads like complicity. They need Israel to look
lawful, so they pretend this is law in action.
But it's not law, it's maintenance. Inside Israel's
legal core, the chill is already setting in.
Officers whisper that they'll refuse certain
assignments. Others update their wills. Not because
they expect death, because they expect disgrace.
When telling the truth becomes a security offence,
everyone with access to the truth becomes a liability.
That's how institutions die. Not with riots,
but with silence. People stop writing, they stop
arguing, they stop remembering. Look at what's
happened to language itself. National security
means protecting the myth. Integrity means obedience.
Transparency means whatever the censor allows.
The same terms that once described democracy
now describe control. This is what happens when
a country wages a permanent war and calls it
normal life. The war comes home. It starts policing
its own lawyers. And there's a personal dimension
that never makes it into the headlines too. A
woman who spent her career proving Israel's legality
ended up proving its corruption. She broke rank
because her conscience finally outweighed her
fear. For that she's in custody, labelled a traitor.
The soldiers she exposed walked free. That contrast
is the whole story. Israel didn't just arrest
a whistleblower, it arrested the idea that legality
might still mean decency. And yet our act changed
the terrain. The footage is evidence now. It's
in the hands of the ICC, the UN, every major
human rights body. The more Israel suppresses
it, the more official it becomes. You can't un
-leak the truth. You can only prove over and
over that you're scared of it. And that's the
paradox they built for themselves. Every punishment
becomes another disclosure. Every gag order reads
like a confession of what they're hiding. Western
politicians will keep calling Israel a democracy
until the phrase loses all oxygen, but... Democracies
don't need to jail their lawyers to stay upright.
Democracies don't vanish people for a day and
then parade them in court for leaking proof of
abuse. Democracies don't downgrade the most serious
sexual assault to severe misconduct. These aren't
democratic mistakes, they're the authoritarian
instincts performed in a democratic costume.
The uniform doesn't make the system clean, it
makes the system look civilized whilst it rots
from the inside out. The bigger collapse is moral.
For decades Israel sold the line of being the
most moral army in the world. It's in every briefing,
every embassy talking point, every sympathetic
newspaper column. That line kept the weapons
flowing and the criticism muted. Now the army's
own lawyer has proved that morality was just
paperwork. You can't rebuild that with press
releases. Once your own conscience testifies
against you, the trial's already over. The state
can still convict her, it can strip her pension.
gag the hearings, reassign the judges, it can
even destroy the footage. But what it can't destroy
is the order of events. The abuse happened, the
leak happened, the arrest happened, in that sequence
on record beyond spin. That timeline will outlive
every career involved. One day when the court
files open it'll read like an autopsy of legality.
This is where Israel finds itself now, a state
defending its reputation with the tools of repression
it used to deny owning. The same logic that built
the occupation is now policing the truth. You
can't call that democracy, you can only call
it decay. Tomi Erashalmi's disappearance, her
letter, her arrest, these are not footnotes of
the anatomy of a government afraid of its own
reflection. For a moment when she was missing
the mass slipped, Israelis saw what it means
to live in a country where honesty is a hazard.
Finding her alive didn't close the wound, it
marked it. The wound is trust and it's bleeding
out through every courtroom door. History will
remember her differently from the way the headlines
frame her now, not as a traitor, not as unstable,
but as the point where the system confessed.
She didn't leak secrets, she leaked reality,
and the reaction proved that reality is the one
thing this Israeli state cannot survive. They
can keep her under house arrest, they can drag
the case through years of hearings, they can
rewrite the law to make sure no one ever tries
it again. But the story is fixed. The world has
seen who gets punished and who doesn't. the soldiers'
names will fade, hers won't. Israel wanted to
bury the whistleblower, it buried its own pretence
of having law of integrity instead. And no amount
of silence will learn a thought. Speaking of
matters of honesty and integrity though, the
very basis for Israel's wars is now a matter
of conjecture in such regards. So desperate is
Netanyahu for an all -new war front, it seems,
he's now basically made one up. And no, I'm not
kidding. Check out this video recommendation
here. as you're suggested next watch to find
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