The State of Israel and the Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs petitioned the Chairman of the Central Elections Committee, Supreme Court Judge Judge Yitzhak Amit, to issue an order instructing the Foreign Ministry Employees’ Committee to refrain from interfering with the regular course of the elections and to cancel any instruction given to prevent the sending of ballot boxes and voting materials to state missions abroad. To.
As published in Globes, the committee announced that at this stage it will not send the ballot boxes as part of the sanctions due to the ongoing labor dispute for more than a year. In a letter of demand from the committee on behalf of the Election Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, published in Globes on Thursday, the workers were warned that this was a violation of the law. In the petition submitted on Friday shortly before the start of Shabbat, it was stated that delaying the delivery of the ballot boxes – “something that disturbs the regular course of the elections,” as stated in section 119(a)(1) of the Election Law.
According to the petitioners, to the extent that the employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refrain from sending the ballots, the ballots may not reach their destination in time to allow the voting of civil servants and other bodies entitled to vote at Israeli missions abroad, something that will result in an extremely serious violation of the fundamental constitutional right to vote, and during the regular course of the Knesset elections as a whole.
In the decision, the judge stated that responses will be submitted in writing by tomorrow, Sunday morning, September 25, 2022, and whenever the judge thinks that a hearing should be held – it will be held on Wednesday morning, September 28, 2022, and Arnon Bar David – the chairman of the Histadrut himself, will participate in it.
The Foreign Ministry’s Workers’ Committee announced its intention to disrupt the elections in the delegations, to the Central Election Committee, which turned to the Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Alon Oshfiz, who is staying with the Prime Minister in New York.
Let’s recall that in the elections to the 21st Knesset, a similar threat arose from the employees of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and then the legal advisor of the ministry wrote an opinion according to which if the employees of the ministry prevent the delivery of the ballot boxes and envelopes, this may be a violation of the Election Law and the same section 119 – but he did not state this categorically.
Legally sanctioned labor dispute or criminal offence
The office’s employees’ committee applied for its own legal opinion, which was provided by the lawyer Ofir Sobol. In response to the question, Sobol wrote that the allegation of a violation of the election law is not based on any precedent and that it goes too far in the use of the section in question. according to which this section is intended to prevent damage to the purity of the elections, the integrity of the procedure and the counting of votes, and not in logistical matters as in this case.
“This is a legally approved labor dispute,” states Attorney Sobol, a dispute that allows for legitimate sanctions naturally causes discomfort and difficulties, in order to exert pressure to end the conflict. He also writes that Begetz determined that the authority of the chairman of the Central Election Commission to issue restraining orders is limited to cases where A violation of the law, and if there is no such violation, he cannot issue such an order.
We wrote in Globes this week that as part of the sanctions, the office employees did not provide Prime Minister Lapid with organization services for his recent trips and he hired a private company to handle the logistics at a cost of approximately NIS 800,000. The employees of the ministry avoided meeting Lapid in New York with the exception of the ambassadors and the consul general, and according to them, due to their non-involvement, Lapid met with a relatively small number of heads of state, ambassadors and foreign ministers than usually in the National Assembly discussions. Lapid, for his part, isolates the ministry’s senior employees and does not participate in policy preparations for meetings and hosting heads of state and foreign ministers – according to the employees.
The threat of not handling the delivery of the ballot boxes is a real worsening of the labor dispute that has been going on for more than a year. Last month, Lapid’s office published as if most of the workers’ demands had been reached in agreement with the Treasury and the Histadrut, but a Globes check showed that there were no conclusions and the Histadrut and the Ministry of Finance announced that the negotiations were deadlocked.