For more than a decade, Israeli officials have warned of an alleged international campaign to “delegitimise” the Jewish state. The accusation has been repeated so often that it has hardened into dogma. A new investigation dubbed “Israel Files” reveals what this rhetoric was designed to obscure: not a besieged democracy acting in good faith, but a state that has deliberately organised the dismantling of international justice to preserve a regime of permanent domination over Palestinians.
The documents uncovered by French investigative media outlet Mediapart and the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network, more than two million internal emails, memos, contracts, and legal notes from the Israeli Ministry of Justice, expose a state strategy that treats law not as a constraint on power, but as a weapon to neutralise it. Courts are no longer arenas of accountability. They are battlefields to be captured, delayed, or rendered ineffective.
In 2010, under the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel quietly created a specialised structure within its Ministry of Justice dedicated to managing what officials internally described as strategic legal threats abroad. Its mission was never debated in parliament. Its existence was barely acknowledged publicly. Yet its mandate was sweeping: to ensure that Israeli officials, soldiers, and state-linked corporations would never face prosecution outside Israel.
According to the leaked documents, this department did not function like a conventional legal office. It operated as a cross-institutional command centre, coordinating legal action with diplomatic services, security agencies, and political networks. It mapped foreign judicial systems, identified “hostile” jurisdictions, monitored human rights organisations, and tracked individual judges and prosecutors involved in cases concerning Israel.
Lawsuits were not answered; they were preempted. The department anticipated legal action months or years in advance and mobilised external law firms before complaints were even filed. Its objective was not to win cases on the merits, but to ensure that cases never reached substance. (more...)
‘The Israel Files’: The Architecture of Impunity – Infiltrating the EU
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