12-09-07 The ongoing US-Israeli love affair, b) Landmark events in unannounced regime change in Israel 1984-2002

The Bus 300 Affair (1984), the Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1995), and the death of the Supreme Court’s Chief Clerk Shmaryahu Cohen (2002), show the hallmarks of unannounced regime change in the State of Israel. Was the United States, or United States interests involved? At least in the third event.
    
Former top IDF Commander Yitzhaq Mordechai; late Prime Minitster Yitzhaq Rabin; late Chief Clerk of the Supreme Court Shmaryahu Cohen (שמריהו כהן)

In the ongoing love affair, there were benefits and damages to both sides.  Which side suffered the greater damage, is yet to be determined.  The claim underlying the list of landmarks events below, is that the State of Israel went through an unannounced regime change between 1984 and 2002, similar to the one experienced earlier in the United States.  The effects in both nations are similar – widespread corruption of the courts and the legal profession, impoverishment of the many, enrichment of the few, and undermining of Human Rights and the Rule of Law.

1.    The Bus 300 Affair (1984)
The case came in the aftermath of Israeli Supreme Court decisions, which prohibited torture and unlawful killing of prisoners. 
Wikipedia:
The Bus 300 affair, also known as Kav 300 affair, was a 1984 incident in which Shin Bet members executed two Arab bus hijackers, immediately after the hostage crises incident ended and the two terrorists were captured.
After the incident the Shin Bet members gave a false testimony on their involvement in the affair. The Israeli military censor blacked out coverage of the hijacking originally, nevertheless, the publication of information regarding the affair in foreign press, and eventually in the Israeli media, led a public uproar which led many in the Israeli public to demand that the circumstances surrounding the deaths of terrorists would be investigated. In 1985 a senior Israeli army general Yitzhak Mordechai was acquitted of charges related to the deaths of the captured terrorists. Later, it emerged that members of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, had implicated the general, while concealing who gave the direct order that the prisoners be killed. In 1986 the Attorney General of Israel, Yitzhak Zamir, was forced to resign after he refused to call off an investigation into the Shin Bet's role in the affair.  Shortly afterwards Avraham Shalom, head of the Shin Bet resigned and was given a full Presidential pardon for unspecified crimes, while pardons were granted to many involved before charges were laid. Following the scandal, the Landau Commission was set up to investigate Shin Bet procedures.
Some conspiracy theorists claim that the case established the superiority of the Secret Service over the rule of law.
There is no evidence of US involvement in the case.

2.    The Assassination of Yitzhaq Rabin
Wikipedia:
The assassination of Yitzhaq Rabin took place on November 4, 1995  at 21:30, at the end of a rally in support of the Oslo Accords at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. The assassin, a religious Zionist named Yigal Amir, strenuously opposed Rabin's peace initiative and particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords.
Prior to the assassination, current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaged in a campaign of denigration of then Prime Minister Rabin. Conduct of the former was denounced even then as incitement.
The Israeli Secret Service is responsible for the security of the Prime Minister, and also reports directly to him. Israeli media and court proceedings show that the Security Service implanted in a fringe group a provocateur, named Avishai Raviv, who  radicalized the group.  However, when the group got ready to assassinate Rabin, the implant failed to inform his superiors.  Raviv was prosecuted for Misprision of Felonies, but was found by the Israeli court “not guilty”.
In the face of ongoing conspiracy theories, an extreme right wing senior politician was quoted to have said that if there was a conspiracy by the Security Service, Rabin himself was to blame for his own assassination, since the Security Service was under his direct authority.
There is no evidence of US involvement in the case, although the US has been involved in similar operations in other client states.  There is no doubt that the US trained, current prime minister, Netanyahu, is closer to at least some part of the US leadership more than Rabin ever was.

3.    The death of the Supreme Court’s Chief Clerk Shmaryahu Cohen (2002)
Even the Hebrew Wikipedia does not have an entry for Shmaryahu Cohen.
From the Methods section of a paper by this author in Data Analytics 2012:
Subsequently, a cursory survey was conducted of the pattern of judges’ signatures and clerk’s certification of records over the past two decades. The significance of events around 2001-2003 was identified.
Accordingly, a more detailed survey was conducted of records of that period, including data mining relative to changes in distribution of specific word combinations, related to certification over time (e.g., “Chief Clerk”, “Registrar”, “Shmaryahu Cohen” (the late Chief Clerk of the Supreme Court), “Boaz Okon” (former Registrar of the Supreme Court), True Copy). 
Subsequently, court records that were identified as outliers in such distributions (e.g. Decision records bearing the name of the late Chief Clerk Shmaryahu Cohen, issued later than the date of his death) were individually examined. Such data mining procedures enabled the discovery of hundreds of fraudulent decision records.
Once the death of the late Chief Clerk of the Supreme Court on March 7, 2002, was identified as a key event in this context, Google searches were conducted to further elucidate the event.  It turned out that he reportedly died of “sudden cardiac arrest”, after toasting a retiring staff member in an office party.  Additionally, Google searches discovered a complaint, filed with the Israel Police by a family member/friend two weeks after the event, alleging murder.  However, the complaint failed to present any reasonable motive for such murder.  Regardless, web pages were discovered with various conspiracy theories in this regard.
Based on the findings from such data mining efforts, requests were filed on the Ministry of Justice and the Administration of Courts, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, for records that would provide the legal foundation for the profound changes in certification patterns between 2001-3,  the appointment records of the current chief clerks of the courts, the appointment records of the Registrars of Certifying Authorities, pursuant to the Electronic Signature Act (2001), secondary legislation that might have authorized the changes, etc.
Additionally, outside sources were reviewed for information regarding the history of the development and implementation of the electronic records systems of the courts: media reports, and in particular the 2010 State Ombudsman’s Report 60b.
From the Results section of the same paper:
The 2010 State Ombudsman’s Report 60b reviewed the development and implementation of Net Ha-Mishpat. The report describes a system that was developed with no written specification and with no core supervision by State employees, the issuance of contracts to outside corporations with no bidding, and acceptance of the system with no independent testing of its performance by State employees.  Most alarming, the Ombudsman’s Report indicated that unknown number of individuals had been issued double Smart ID cards.  The Ombudsman pointed out that the development and implementation of the system was conducted in violation of State law. However, the report failed to evaluate the validity of the system as a whole.
From the Discussion section of the same paper:
It appears that updates in the electronic records systems and the passage of the Electronic Signature Act made it necessary to decide between the development of systems, based on valid, lawful specifications and lawful digital signatures, or systems based on no specifications and no digital signatures at all.
The results show that effectively, decision was made around 2002 in favor of the latter option.  The most obvious trait of the systems now in place, is that among thousands of electronic public legal records, which were examined as part of the current study, not a single digitally signed record was discovered.
Furthermore, the findings suggest that such decision required the neutralization of the main watchdogs, relative to integrity of legal records: the chief clerks of the Supreme Court and the district courts, and the Registrar of Certifying Authorities. 
Additionally, data mining results show that following the passage of the Electronic Signature Act (2001), a small private corporation, ComSign, LTD, controlled by veterans of the IDF Intelligence Unit 8200 (cyberwar), were unlawfully established as the sole certifying authority for the legal records of the State of Israel.
The Recommendations of the 2012 Human Rights Alert (NGO) submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council included:
2.    A Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be established to examine the conduct of members of the judiciary and the legal profession, who were involved in undermining the integrity of the electronic record systems; 
It is doubted that such examination could avoid the death of Shmaryahu Cohen, and the conduct of his successor, Sarah Lifschitz, who is completing now her 10th year in office with no lawful appointment record for the office of Chief Clerk of the Supreme Court.
Two US-based corporations, IBM and EDS, are the ones referred to in the Ombudsman’s report relative to the unlawful development and implementation of the electronic record systems of the courts. The Ombudsman’s Report also notes that the servers of the courts of the State of Israel (effectively – the entire body of the records of the courts) was removed from the custody of the State, and the servers are now under the custody of an unnamed corporation.
Conduct surrounding the implementation of the electronic records of the Israeli courts and the unlawful holding of offices by the clerks of the Israeli courts over the past decade closely resemble events that took place in the United State 10-20 years earlier.

In conclusion:
There is no doubt that in parallel to the increasingly tight relationship with the United States, events took place in the State of Israel, which redefined the political power map, irrespective of written law of the land.  What the direct or indirect role of US interests was in this process remains largely unknown.