Tali Gottlieb’s Defiance Over State Secrets Turns Into a Broader Political and Legal Battle

MK Tali Gottlieb is facing a growing legal and political storm after publicly revealing the name of a Shin Bet officer and then campaigning against the secrecy order that enabled charges against her. The column says her attacks at Knesset hearings also targeted Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, the media, security chiefs and, most recently, Defense Minister Israel Katz, whom she accused of bowing to the former justice minister. Katz signed the confidentiality certificates only after months of delay, reportedly following a call from current Shin Bet chief David Zini, a fact that angered Gottlieb because she was not consulted.

Attorney Idan Seger, who represents Shikma Bressler and her husband, filed a complaint asking the attorney general and the police to open an urgent investigation into Gottlieb for obstruction of justice and interfering with a public servant. The complaint says her attempt to stop Katz from signing was meant to block the criminal case against her. Gottlieb argues no secrecy certificate was needed, citing Section 19 of the Shin Bet law, but the article says she ignored the same law when she exposed the officer’s identity and vowed to continue.

The article says Gottlieb’s wider claims about a Shin Bet, military and intelligence conspiracy to enable the October 7 attack are false and unsupported. It says she first posted the allegations on X on January 24, 2024, at 10:50 a.m., and repeated them even after civil activists and the Shin Bet warned her that the material was dangerous and untrue. It quotes the indictment as saying that from that day until the charges were filed, she knowingly left the post online and announced she would keep revealing classified information whenever she saw fit.

The piece also rejects Gottlieb’s claim that the High Court found a “leak channel” to journalist Ronen Bergman, saying the court ruled the opposite in a petition by the Netanyahu-aligned group B’charnu B’Chaim. It adds that Bressler and later her husband sued Gottlieb for defamation in the Central District Court in Lod in February 2024, and that Judge Rami Haimovich has still not issued a substantive ruling on Gottlieb’s motion to dismiss on parliamentary immunity grounds. The court says the decision is still being written, while Gottlieb continues to spread the same allegations.