2025-06-17
Holding tight... with distinction...
Mr. Uri Zernik and Oded sent notices from the U.S. and the U.K., respectively, to the Zernik cousins in Israel - "Hope y'all are holding tight."
Well, well, well... with a genocide in Gaza and a war with Iran (described by Israeli experts as futile, so far, in its effect on the Iranian nuclear program, but essential for the Prime Minister's political expediency), not only are we holding tight, we are holding tight with distinction...
The three brothers grew up on Mount Carmel, Haifa, in a sheltered, somewhat privileged environment of no special distinction. And yet, at age 70 +/-, they are engaged in an affair, allegedly distinguished in its criminality, now pending review and decision by the embattled Israeli Attorney General, Gali Baharav-Miara.
Something has gone awfully wrong at 2 Kidron Street, if, at their advanced age, the 3 Zernik brothers are engaged in an affair, cooked up by their late father, who devoted the last 6 years of his life to engineering a court fraud, which he beqeathed to his sons, Messrs. Uri Zernik and Dror Zernik. As of June 5, 2025, it had grown into a massive fraud complaint (~500 pages, including appendices) that was filed with the Israel Police Fraud Division and registered after being reviewed by police fraud experts. Messrs. Uri Zernik and Dror Zernik are now entirely insignificant in this enterprise; it has grown into a significant court corruption affair.
It was, by some strange twist of the calendar, the 1st anniversary of the sham lawsuit, filed against me by the two above-named Messrs. on June 5, 2024, and the 15th (!) anniversary of the filing by the two Messrs. in collusion with their father of the initial false and misleading papers in the Haifa court against me on June 5, 2010, launching their father's farewell enterprise... perhaps the most remarkable feat of his lifetime...
Partial lineup of the respectable suspects in the criminal complaints: Judge Esperanza Alon, Attorney Amos Sadika, Judge Hila Gurevitz, Attorney Rachle Ben-Ari, Mr. Dror Zernik, Attorney Yoav Salomon, Mr. Uri Zernik.
When I filed the criminal complaint on June 5th, I assumed it had a close to zero chance of being seriously addressed by the Israeli law and justice agencies, since the Israeli justice system has developed an undeclared policy of impunity for judges. In the almost 80-year history of the state, not a single judge has been convicted of corruption charges (e.g., fraud, deceit, breach of trust, bribery, etc), despite corruption, particularly in the family courts, being notorious. It should be noted for the general reader that, among criminologists and human rights NGOs, impunity for officeholders (any officeholders, not necessarily judges) is considered a hallmark of a corrupt law and justice system, and a sure recipe for further growth of corruption. Obviously, it has no legal foundation; therefore, its implementation often requires unlawful actions by senior law enforcement and justice officers. Therefore, the documentation of the way law and justice agencies address the complaint of judicial corruption is the most important insight gained from this affair.
Daphna Hacker, an internationally renowned Israeli family law professor (Tel Aviv University), described the family courts already in 2016 as a "total jungle" to be avoided at all costs, and wondered why they continued to be called "courts".
I didn't consider the filing an exercise in futility, though, since tracking the mishandling of the complaint by the higher echelons of the law and justice system would generate unique, interesting materials.
Among the suspects, beyond the judges, Attorney Rachel Ben-Ari should be considered a "public figure": She advertises her office as "90 years of legal excellence", since for 3 generations her family's law office has been an integral part of the Israeli legal establishment. For years, she served as a member of the Judicial Selection Committee, representing the Israel Bar Association. In her bio, she notes that she headed the Haifa branch of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, serves on the boards of directors of public corporations, chaired the Audit Committee of the Channel 2 News Corp., etc.
Judge Hila Gurevitz was appointed to the bench during Rachel Ben-Ari's tenure on the committee. In this respect, the current affair resembles a judicial corruption affair that exploded in 2020: It turned out that Attorney Effi Naveh (who succeeded Ben-Ari on the committee) formed a relationship with Presiding Judge of the Tel-Aviv District Court, Eitan Orenstein (whose promotion Naveh had engineered), in which Naveh was dictating to Orenstein how to rule in large corporate bankruptcy case...
However, whereas in the Nave-Orenstein affair, it was clear that Naveh was corrupting Orenstein, in the case at hand, the evidence indicates it's the other way around...
Beyond that, the earlier chapter of this affair, in 2013, involved Judge Esperanza Alon and Attorney Amos Sadika, the latter appearing as counsel for Robert Zernik and Dror Zernik...
Key characters in the evolving affair, earlier chapter: Judge Esperanza Alon, former State Attorney Shay Nitzan, former Attorney General Avihai Mandelblit, current Director General of the Ministry of Justice, Itamar Donenfeld. The case documents the ideological rift between the current Minister of Justice and Director General Itamar Donenfeld on the one hand and the State Attorney's office... It's the exact opposite of what the media report... The State Attorney's office and Shay Nitzan in person were involved in unlawfully disappearing my complaint, and refuse to provide it to the Ministry of Justice FOIA officer, working under Minister of Justice Yariv Levine and his Director General Itamar Donenfeld, who tried to comply with provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.
In the earlier chapter of this affair, I filed a complaint with the police fraud division. The key suspect was Judge Esperanza Alon. Then, I had to file it with Attorney General Avihai Mandelblit, since by law, only the Attorney General may order a police investigation against a judge, and only the Attorney General has the authority to close a complaint against a judge without conducting an investigation.
However, the implementation of the unlawful impunity policy requires NOT to investigate complaints of judicial corruption. Law and justice agencies avoided such investigations for years. Therefore, my earlier chapter complaint disappeared into thin air sometime after I filed it with Attorney General Mandelblit. By law, they must notify the complainant once a decision is made and serve him with the reasoned decision by the authorized person.
Eventually, I could track the complaint - it had moved from Mandelblit's bureau to State Attorney Shay Nitzan's bureau. From there, it was transferred to the Bureau of the Deputy State Attorney (criminal affairs). Then, it vanished! No matter how many times I wrote to then Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and then Attorney General Mandelblit, I got no response.
Late last year, with the new Minister of Justice Yariv Levin, who promotes a judicial reform, I decided to take a different approach: I filed a Freedom of Information request for "the decision record on my vanished complaint, signed by the decider".
FOIA requests are supposed to be processed within 30 days. Sometimes, the responding agency issues an extension for an additional 30-day period. Here, it took 6 months, and at the end, there was no conclusion to the process... I have filed dozens of FOIA requests over the years, both in the U.S. and in Israel. I have never had an experience like this one.
What I gained from informal communications with the FOIA officer was that State Attorney Shay Nitzan unlawfully disappeared my complaint, claiming to have issued a decision. However, he had absolutely no authority to issue such a decision; if it indeed exists, it should be declared void, not voidable, by any competent court. And surely State Attorney Shay Nitzan had no authority to disappear my complaint as well as his purported decision. They both were taken off the record, so it was difficult to track them.
One cannot assume that such conduct occurred without Attorney General Avihai Mandelblit being aware of it. It was Attorney General Mandelblit's responsibility to process the complaint, and the complaint started its adventures in his bureau. That was probably the reason that he failed to answer. He tried to keep his name off the record in this case... let State Attorney Shay Nitzan take care of the dirty work.
The FOIA officer wrote to me that my FOIA request was "COMPLEX" because the current State Attorney's office refused to cooperate with the Director General's office, which instructed them to comply with the law and provide me a copy of the purported decision on my earlier complaint.
This story is mind-boggling. The State Attorney is the highest officer directly responsible for law enforcement. Here, decisions are made regarding prosecution or closing investigation files in the most complex and controversial cases. They are supposed to be the model of compliance with the law. State Attorney Shay Nitzan has been gone for a couple of years. And yet, the new Attorney General and senior staff of his office are standing firm in shielding Shay Nitzan's alleged criminal conduct. Shay Nitzan's criminality, in turn, was motivated by the need to provide Judge Esperanza Alon with impunity, after I caught her committing various types of computer fraud.
And yet, thanks to an insignificant, home-made apparent fraud by Robert Zernik and Messrs Uri and Dror Zernik (in the initial stage, they worked without an attorney), we've got the perfect documentation of corruption and criminality at the highest echelons of the Israeli justice system...
An 83-year-old Robert Zernik, for the first time in his life without Ima z"l watching over him, finally had a chance to act out his somewhat childish, mischievous, criminal fantasies.
I remember visiting him in 2010. He stunned me by asking for my help in his failed attempt to defraud our upstairs elderly neighbors, Kahana. They were our good neighbors for decades. By 2010 it was over 40 years. I used to babysit for their daughters when they wanted to go out at night. Ella Kahana was sick; she couldn't go up the stairs. So, the Kahanas asked to build an elevator to allow her to get in and out of the apartment.
He didn't object to the building of the elevator, but he refused to participate in funding it. That was fine; it was his right. So Kahana paid for it, and Kahana did a nice professional job on that elevator. But then, in 2010, he told me he had ordered an "engineering report" to show defects in the elevator, so that Kahana would have to pay for the repairs. However, these were apparently fake defects, so in order to generate the "engineering report," he had to hire a fraudster. In short, he presented Kahana with an "engineering report" that was by a non-engineer... Kahana, who in contrast with him, was a sharp fellow, caught it right away.
So there he was, asking me to help him defraud Kahana, while I was asking him repeatedly not to start another fraud against me, because I knew the character. Caught him before.
He answered me that the fact that I caught him before did not impress him... In short, while he was asking me to advice him on a way to complete his failed fraud against Kahana, he was telling me he was determined to continue with his frauds in the family.
I sometimes wonder how he recruited Messrs Dror and Uri Zernik. Obviously, they were handsomely rewarded... a couple of million NIS or more in today's currency.
And Uzi? How did he recruit Uzi as a card-carrying member of the crew?
Endnotes:
1. To me it was clear all along the years that Mandelblit and Nitzan were crooks, although I had no clue until a few months ago that Shay Nitzan disappeared my criminal complaint, starring Judge Esperanza Alon. Given my intimate relationship with the Israeli justice system, one day, with a friend, I find myself in the elevator with Shay Nitzan. Naturally, I start singing... a song about corrupt State Attorneys, and my friend was recording it with his cell phone.
Shay Nitzan asked me: Are you trying to suggest that I am corrupt?
I never answered, just kept singing...
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2017-08-29 Personal performance for State Attorney Shay Nitzan// הופעה פרטית לשי ניצן
which quickly grew into alleged "high crimes and misdemeanors" now pending review by the Israeli Attorney General, relative to the conduct of the Haifa courts.
Examining it from a positive perspective, I routinely promote the Zernik brothers' affair, which I usually refer to as the Judge Hila Gurevitz and Attorney Rachel Ben-Ari affair, stating that it can serve as a unique case study for informed, educated public discourse on judicial reform, now being heatedly debated.
Of special interest of course, it the
Pic:
1. On June 5, 2025, I filed a fraud complaint with the Israel Police, Fraud Division, naming as suspects Mr. Uri Zernik, Mr. Dror Zernik, their attorneys, Rachel Ben-Ari and Yoav Salomon, as well as Judge Hila Gurevitz. It is no minor task to convince a police fraud investigator of the validity of a fraud complaint against a judge... However, with a nearly 500-page fraud complaint, providing detailed documentation of what I described as a multi-year, multi-layered fraud, I managed to get it registered with the police.
The police are not authorized to investigate complaints against judges unless instructed to do so by the Israeli Attorney General. Therefore, on June 5, I also uploaded the complaint together with the police certificate of complaint registration to the Attorney General's office. Now it is pending the Attorney General's decision.
The chances of approval of an investigation against a judge are basically none. No judge has ever been convicted of corruption in the entire history of the State of Israel, although corruption in the courts is rampant, particularly in the family courts.
Famously (and/or infamously... :)), Professor Daphna Hacker (Tel Aviv University), likely to be Israel's foremost family law expert, internationally recognized, wrote in 2016:
"It's a total jungle in the courts. Do anything you can to avoid them... With judges ignoring the law and binding Supreme Court precedents... What is this thing that calls itself a court? ... There is no way to teach family law anymore, since what happens in the courts has nothing to do with the law...".
From recent correspondence with Linda, it became apparent that she was unaware that exactly a year ago, on June 5, 2024, exactly a year prior to filing the fraud complaint, Mr. Uri Zernik and Mr. Dror Zernik sued me in court. Moreover, the complaint alleged that June 5, 2025, was also the 15th birthday of this fraud. It started with a court filing by Robert Zernik, Uri Zernik and Dror Zernik on June 5, 2010!
As soon as I received the initial pleading of the June 5th, 2024, lawsuit, I notified both Mr. Uri Zernik, Mr. Dror Zernik, and their attorneys that I considered it a sham or fake court action. Specifically, I referred to it as "הכרזה לכל באי בית המשפט בדבר כוונה לנהל הליכי משפט למראית עין" - "a declaration for all those in the courthouse of the intention to run a sham court process".
The Israeli justice system lives in denial; there isn't even a term for it. I had to make up a Hebrew legal term: "הליכים למראית עין". Therefore, to make myself clear, I explained that I was referring to the crime, defined in Texas Penal Code § 32.48 - Simulating Legal Process. In other states it appears under various names. I refer to the Texas version, since it is short and focused, and easy to understand.
I didn't spell it out, but typically, the minimal lineup required for running this type of fraud is a judge, a clerk, and a counsel for one of the parties.
Fraud in the Israeli family courts is rampant. The family courts operate under a unique, ingenious Israeli innovation: all cases are heard behind closed doors, and the 1995 law that established the family courts expressly permits judges flexibility in deviating from civil court procedures "in order to promote justice." The wisdom of the generations tells us that closed doors and undefined court procedures are a sure recipe for corruption. Apparently, although Jews have a longstanding reputation for their brilliant legal minds, the wisdom of the generations was lost upon the Israeli legal experts who conceived these courts.
So, there you have a court system, which is the latest innovation in the Israeli justice system. For well over a decade, it is reputed to be thoroughly corrupt, but there has never been an indictment of a family court judge. Most likely there has never been even an investigation...
How do I know? In 2016, as part of my... "Draft"...
I further claimed in my fraud complaint that it was probably one of a kind complaint, the like of which has never been filed with the Israeli police, and isn't likely to be filed again anytime soon. The reason is the unique coincidence in this case --
* ומה תרומתי לנושא?
כמי שכתב דוחות על מערכת המשפט בישראל, דוחות שעברו ביקורת מומחים והפכו לחלק מהדוחות הרשמיים של מועצת זכויות האדם של האו"ם על ישראל (2012, 2018), כולל דו"ח קצר לפי הזמנה של מחלקת המדינה של ארה"ב (2020), אינני מתיימר להתחרות בפרופ' דפנה הקר בניתוח הרעיוני של הכשלים החמורים בבתי המשפט לענייני משפחה בישראל. אולם מנקודת המבט של תחום מומחיותי, ברור שעמדתה של פרופ' דפנה הקר מוגבלת, אולי מכיוון שאין בידה המסמכים שיש בידי, ואולי עקב הנורמות המחייבות את חברי הגילדה*, לפיהן פרופ' דפנה הקר מצאה רק "שרירות", אבל לא "שחיתות".
לדעתי, השחיתות בבתי המשפט לענייני משפחה בישראל חמורה בהרבה מהשחיתות בשאר מערכת המשפט (להוציא כמובן את בתי המשפט הצבאיים בשטחים. לפי החוק הבינלאומי יש לראות את שופטיהם ופרקליטי התביעה בהם כדמויות מפתח בניהול משטר האפרטהייד - פשע נגד האנושות).
ג'ואל בן סימון והחלטות "טיוטה" בבית המשפט לענייני משפחה בירושלים
א) ג'ואל בן סימון ואיילת שקד: לאחר שמחתה לפני משרדה של שרת המשפטים איילת שקד נגד השחיתות בבית המשפט לענייני משפחה בחיפה, גו'אל בן סימון נלקחה ע"י המשטרה לאשפוז כפוי. הן בפניית העובדת הסוציאלית לפסיכיאטר המחוזי והן בצו הפסיכיאטר המחוזי נכתב בכתב יד: "בתיאום עם עו"ד יעל קוטיק, משרד המשפטים <מספר הטלפון הנייד>". ממקום האשפוז הכפוי, גו'אל בן סימון הקליטה ברכה לשבת לשרת המשפטים איילת שקד... מיד במוצאי שבת, דוברה האישי של שרת המשפטים פרסם הודעה, ששרת המשפטים לא הייתה מעורבת באשפוז הכפוי.
ב) מנחם הכהן - שופט בית המשפט לענייני משפחה בירושלים: הכהן היה אחד מקבוצת שופטי משפחה בירושלים, שהתעללו במשך שנים בג'ואל בן סימון, וניהלו במשך שנים הליכים למראית עין בעניינה.
ג) החלטה "טיוטה", שהיא כתב בית דין למראית עין (כלומר - אינה כתב בית דין כלל) מאת השופט מנחם הכהן בעניינה של ג'ואל בן סימון: החלטה למראית עין של השופט מנחם הכהן (מעשה פלילי, עברייני), שהומצאה בדואר רשום ע"י בית המשפט לענייני משפחה בירושלים לגו'אל בן סימון בעת שהוחזקה באשפוז כפוי באיתנים. ההחלטה מתעדת דיון למראית עין שניהל השופט, כחלק מסדרה ארוכה של מעשים פליליים, עברייניים בתיקים של גו'אל בן סימון.
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בפרשת ג'ואל בן סימון תועדו בשנת 2016 הליכים למראית עין, שהתנהלו במשך שנים, ע"י קבוצת שופטים בבית המשפט לענייני משפחה בירושלים. כל ההחלטות בתיקים אלה היו "טיוטות" חסרות כל תוקף. אולם "הטיוטות" האלה הומצאו ע"י בית המשפט לג'ואל בן סימון, על מנת להונות אותה שהן החלטות תקפות של בית משפט של מדינת ישראל ולגרום לה לקבל את סמכותן. זוהי דוגמה מושלמת של ההתנהלות הפלילית המוגדרת במדינות שונות כ"ניהול הליכי משפט למראית עין". בישראל שופטים עוסקים במעשים פליליים כאלה ללא כל ענישה.
