The sea north of Tel Aviv is calm this time of year, which makes it an odd place for the storm now engulfing Israel’s political and military establishment. When Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, until recently the top lawyer in the Israel Defence Forces, was found on that beach alive, shaken, and suddenly a suspect, the country’s headlines trembled. A video had leaked, allegedly showing the brutal abuse of a Palestinian detainee by Israeli soldiers. Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned, claiming responsibility for the leak. A day later, she was in handcuffs.
It would be tempting to read this as a moment of reckoning, a sign that something within the tightly sealed world of military justice and occupation might finally give. But the more likely story is both smaller and sadder; the system is not reeling from what happened in that cell, but from the fact that we saw it happen.
This is a familiar ritual in modern Israel. Outrage over “the footage,” never over the act. A government scandalized not by the violence itself, but by its public exposure. The apparatus will spin, inquiries will be announced, committees will convene. The conclusion, however, is already written: a promise of “review,” a tightening of “protocols,” and a quiet, invisible return to normal. The only lesson learned will be logistical ...how not to get caught next time.
For decades, the military’s legal branch has been both shield and sword: defending soldiers in the field while claiming to uphold “the most moral army in the world.” Tomer-Yerushalmi’s position as Military Advocate General made her the moral accountant of the occupation, balancing rhetoric about international law with the daily realities of checkpoints, raids, and detentions. Her fall from grace says less about her personal integrity than about the impossible contradictions of the role itself. To serve as the conscience of the occupation is to live permanently at war with oneself.
When she resigned, she reportedly said she took “full responsibility” for the leak. That phrase, in the language of bureaucracy, often means something very different: it means she was the last one left holding the bag. The system needed a culprit. The leak, after all, embarrassed too many people. It tore a small hole in a narrative stitched together for years by official spokesmen that misconduct, if it happens, is rare, swiftly punished, and certainly not systemic. A single video can collapse that entire architecture.
In the footage, a Palestinian detainee is seen being beaten, humiliated, perhaps worse. None of it is new, not really. Palestinian prisoners, thousands of them, have been telling similar stories for decades. Human rights groups document them with grim regularity, but most reports are greeted with bureaucratic indifference. The difference this time is that a camera was rolling, and someone inside the system, perhaps disgusted or simply tired, decided that the public had a right to see.
The reaction has been telling. Instead of asking, How could this happen? The establishment asked, Who showed it to us? Leakers, not perpetrators are the enemies. It is a pattern recognizable across many states under stress: transparency is treated as treason, and silence as patriotism. The whistleblower becomes a greater threat than the crime.
Israel’s military culture is built on the notion of self-regulation. It promises to investigate its own, to maintain order without civilian interference. But the closed nature of that system ensures that justice, when it comes, rarely escapes the walls of the barracks. Soldiers are suspended, demoted, occasionally jailed for a few months. Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoners remain where they always were under watch, under suspicion, under someone’s boot.
So will this leak change anything? Unlikely. What it may do is sharpen the choreography of concealment. Cameras will be banned from certain facilities. Phones more closely monitored. Commanders will lecture their units not about ethics, but about discretion. A few training slides will be added on “operational integrity” a euphemism for keeping the ugly parts hidden.
Still, something about this case gnaws at the edges of control. The image of Tomer-Yerushalmi, once the legal guardian of military conduct, walking alone along a beach, hunted not by enemies but by her own institution, has a tragic symmetry. In a country obsessed with loyalty and betrayal, she became both traitor and scapegoat in a single day. Her arrest was less about law than about symbolism. The system needed to show that it could still police itself. And so it did, just not in the direction anyone hoped.
If there is a moral to this unfolding scandal, it’s that moral clarity remains the rarest resource in the region. For Palestinians, the leak confirms what they’ve long known: that suffering in the shadows is part of the design. For Israelis, it’s a mirror briefly held up before being smashed. The truth is too heavy to carry, so it’s buried again beneath layers of national myth and procedural fog.
Yet leaks have a stubborn power. Once something has been seen, it cannot be unseen. The footage will circulate, copied and shared, whispered about in corners of the internet that official censors can’t reach. Young soldiers will see it and feel the uneasy tremor of recognition. So will parents who’ve sent their children into uniform, believing in moral exceptionalism. That is how change begins, not with policy shifts or new legal codes, but with private disquiet, the kind that grows when official stories stop making sense.
Still, disquiet alone does not make justice. It takes courage to speak, and even greater courage to listen. If the past is any guide, this episode will fade into the usual fog of outrage and denial. Another investigation, another quiet absolution. The violence will continue, only more carefully curated.
But every system that relies on silence eventually collapses under the weight of its own secrets. A video leaked today is a crack in tomorrow’s wall. Whether Israel chooses to seal that crack or look through it will say everything about what kind of nation it still hopes to be.
For now, the tide at that Tel Aviv beach keeps rolling in, erasing footprints in the sand. What it cannot wash away is the uneasy knowledge of what’s been seen and what was done in the dark.
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