The story of Israel’s military advocate general (MAG), Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, has become a politically defining moment for the two main factions of Israeli society, both of which believe they are fighting to save Israel’s soul. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems increasingly to lack executive authority. The U.S. is taking over decisions about the future control and governance of Gaza while the settlers and the army are torching the West Bank. The minister of defense has been hinting broadly that he wants the army to wage a new war against Lebanon even as it continues to make incursions into Syria, but the Trump administration has apparently denied a green light to engage in a wider military conflict with either country. In this context, the story of the MAG, the video she leaked and her lies to her superiors and to Israel’s Supreme Court can provide us with significant insight into the state of Israeli politics as the country careens toward self-destruction.
First, the tale. On July 5, 2024, guards at Sde Teiman, a military base in the south of Israel that was turned into a detention camp for Palestinians from Gaza, saw one detainee bleeding heavily. The guards called paramedics, who examined the Palestinian prisoner at the camp clinic and sent him to a hospital, where doctors discovered that he had a torn rectum and severe injuries to his anus and lungs. He also had several broken ribs. He underwent colostomy surgery, was given several blood transfusions and was hospitalized and closely monitored.
Israeli military police initiated an investigation of the incident, deposing more than 100 people, including the prisoner. He said he was attacked by members of a prison guard unit called Force 100, who initially told him they were carrying out a body search. They then assaulted the Palestinian man behind a barrier the guards created with their ballistic shields to prevent other prisoners from witnessing the incident, but they could not prevent CCTV cameras from recording it. On July 29, military police wearing balaclavas and face masks arrived at Sde Teiman to detain nine members of Force 100 under suspicion of sodomy and rape. Soldiers serving at the detention camp physically attacked the military police as they arrested the suspects. Protesters outside the camp gates, including right-wing members of the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, as well as government ministers, tried to physically prevent the military police from arresting the suspects. Right-wing protest demonstrations in support of the detained prison guards continued throughout the arraignment; after a few days, all the suspects were released from custody, pending indictment.
The right-wing demonstrations were broadcast around the world as evidence that Israelis support “the right to rape” Palestinians. In Israel, they became fodder for the internecine battles between liberals and the far right. The wheels of military justice turned slowly, and the court only handed down the indictments on Feb. 19, 2025, charging five prison guards with severe abuse. The Israeli media was much quicker. On Aug. 6, 2024, fragments of the video were broadcast on the country’s most widely viewed commercial news broadcast, with commentary from legal correspondent Guy Peleg. Documents from the investigation were leaked as well, revealing that two of the suspects failed a lie detector test that was administered while they were under investigation for the assault.
This is where it gets thorny. Right-wing organizations demanded that the leak be investigated. The MAG asked her deputy to chair an internal inquiry, which determined the leaker could not be identified. On Oct. 29, 2025, the attorney general announced a criminal investigation based on information obtained by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. According to this information, the MAG was aware that her spokesperson had leaked the video to Peleg, the television news correspondent. Israeli law requires media outlets to submit any army-related story to the military censor for approval before publication. The deputy chief censor of the Israeli army later confirmed that she approved the publication of the leaked tape, to demonstrate that Israel is capable of investigating itself. On Nov. 2, the MAG’s car was found empty on a Tel Aviv beach, with a suicide note on the driver’s seat. The MAG contacted her husband later that day from another beach within walking distance, and the police picked her up. After a night in police custody, she was placed under house arrest, where she apparently attempted once more to commit suicide. She survived.
As she awaits trial, the MAG’s story has dominated the Israeli news cycle. It is presented as a partisan battle. The right-wing government wants her investigation to be conducted by independent counsel (read: an investigator loyal to the government). The centrist liberal establishment is aghast and suggests that, while the MAG may have lied, she had good reasons for doing so and that abandoning her now would amount to opening the gates of Israeli democracy to those seeking only to dismantle it. The story, both sides suggest, is not about the Palestinian prisoner specifically or about the war in Gaza in general. It is an in-house affair, about the fissures within Israeli society. The abused Palestinian prisoner was released to Gaza in one of the recent swap deals. He cannot testify at the trial of the prison guards who abused him, nor at the trial that surely awaits the MAG. What he would have to say is irrelevant as far as the warring factions are concerned; for both sides, the issue is not what the soldiers did to the Palestinian prisoner, but how and whether the law was applied.
What are their competing narratives? For the government and the nationalist right, including the settlers, the MAG’s behavior is representative of the Israeli deep state, which they define as an alliance of leftist, secular bureaucrats who want to make Israel an egalitarian state with equal civil rights for all citizens, including non-Jews, which they believe will erase its Jewish character. The current global political climate, they believe, presents the left with a perfect opportunity to accomplish all its goals. In their view, the international criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza is evidence of full-blown global antisemitism, or unabashed Jew hatred. They see the liberal Israeli Jews who support the MAG as having rejected and betrayed true Israeli Judaism. And what is this true Israeli Judaism? It is, first and foremost, exceptional. Israeli Jews, a category that is extended to all Jews who espouse right-wing views, must defend themselves at any cost. They believe that one Jewish life is far more valuable than that of any enemy, with only Israel permitted to define who or what constitutes an enemy. The far right believes the deep state aspires to discredit its vision of Jewish Israeli identity, and that it must therefore be stopped.
Israeli mainstream media outlets have reported almost nothing about what the army did to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and most Israelis cherish the view that the army, with which they identify strongly because it is a conscript army in which they, their family and their community serve, operates according to a certain moral code. It was within the context of their ignorance about what happened in Gaza and their emotional connection to the army that liberals were deeply shocked to see the video of extreme violence committed by the soldiers at Sde Teiman. They believe that the sexual assault and horrific beating constitute a unique and unprecedented incident that occurred because the soldiers were emboldened by the highest echelons of the far-right government. Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir is known for his extremist, inhumane views. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, whose authority extends to the Ministry of Defense policies in the West Bank, is an ideological settler who has always been open with his violent, supremacist views about Palestinians. Netanyahu has spoken many times on the record about his commitment to achieving “total victory” over Hamas. He has quoted both populist and settler rhetoric while also maintaining focus on his own indispensability as he testifies at his corruption trial, now well into its fourth year. The liberals feel that their “citadel,” a descriptor used by the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, is on the verge of falling to the barbarian hordes. This is illustrated by the episode already mentioned, of right-wing politicians breaching the perimeter gates of Sde Teiman military base in an attempt to prevent military police from arresting soldiers suspected of sexually assaulting a Palestinian prisoner. For Israel’s liberals, strange as this may sound to a non-Israeli reader, the military remains Israel’s great social equalizer. Military service, still compulsory for the vast majority of Israeli Jews, requires conscripts to pledge their allegiance to their country’s security, which is by far the most important, even sacred, issue for Israeli Jews across the political spectrum. This commitment, partly because it is made at an early age, has a lifelong impact.
The commitment to security encapsulates the shared conviction that Israel’s raison d’etre is to protect Jewish lives. For Jewish liberals, this is where “Israeliness” begins and ends. Because religious nationalist settlers and secular liberals agree on the transcendent importance of military service, they share a deep dislike of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are exempt from military service. The right sees the military as a means to an end, believing that one cannot save Jewish lives without ensuring Jewish power, while liberals believe in an ethical philosophy called “purity of arms” (“tohar haneshek” in Hebrew), which theoretically requires a soldier to report an immoral act or to refuse an immoral order. The liberals believe the military must strive for the highest moral standards it can achieve as it fights ruthlessly and without compunction to defend Jewish lives. That is why they support the MAG, though she broke the law by lying to the Supreme Court and circumvented military hierarchy by leaking a classified video to the media. For the liberals, she was justified in her actions because she was acting according to the principle of tohar haneshek, which they regard as an essential element of Israeliness. The liberal interpretation holds that the MAG leaked the CCTV footage and lied about having done so because she could not bear the thought of the military being tainted by partisan politics — in this case, by the far-right government failing to carry out a proper investigation into the incident at Sde Teiman — and because she wanted to expose the rogue far right, which liberals regard as the real threat to Israeli society.
The two narratives, left and right, transcend their enmity to agree on one issue. They both dismiss Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. For settlers and the populist right, this is self-explanatory. They do not believe Jews can commit an act of terrorism, let alone genocide. They all see the international criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza and that war’s impact on the West Bank, where settler soldiers are carrying out horrific acts of violence against Palestinian civilians, as unjustified and antisemitic. They see the war in Gaza as an existential conflict and view the criticism from a small subculture of Israelis as treasonous.
The liberal narrative suppresses the genocide altogether. After all, the MAG, whom liberals admire for her actions in exposing the perpetrators of the assault on the Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman, was one of the main architects of the genocide. She and her staff worked diligently to establish its legality. The only antidote for the toxic taint of covering up a genocide is to change the narrative and tell a different story — one that praises the MAG for being willing to maintain Israel’s highest moral standards even at great personal cost. According to this story, what happened at Sde Teiman was an anomaly that demonstrates the potential pitfalls of adopting the far right’s narrative. Such depravity must be stopped. When the predatory bacterium is treated, Israel will return to its senses.
I would like to offer a different interpretation of the events. Approval and even celebration of the genocide is now the norm for the Israeli right. Its supporters want a legal imprimatur that guarantees Israelis will pay no price for their crimes in Gaza, which in any case they refuse to acknowledge having committed. The liberals share the right’s rejection of the term genocide to describe what the army did in Gaza. Still, they understand that they are a minority within Jewish Israeli society and are afraid that the right will accompany accusations about the deep state with actual physical threats. This is the reason for the video leaks; the MAG wanted to establish publicly that the CCTV footage existed before the right could poison the discourse with denials of its very existence. For both camps, the genocide and their complicity in it are irrelevant to the stories they tell in their struggle over Israel’s future. Both right and left have tacitly agreed to delete the past and present. The right enshrines Israel’s genocidal campaign as strategically and morally necessary. The liberals are eager to suppress and reject accusations of genocide that would be placed at their own doorstep. Israelis — right, centrist and liberal — are interested only in winning their own wars against each other; each group wants its version of Israeli character and identity to triumph. In the war on everything and everyone else, particularly the Palestinians, Israelis are united in futile, righteous, passive and aggressive indignation. This is the reading of the MAG saga that is closest to Israel’s current reality.
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