The 'Yigael Sarna' affair: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara are required to appear before Judge Azaria Alkalai at the Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court this coming Tuesday at 11:30 AM to be questioned about the affidavits they submitted in a defamation lawsuit against Yedioth Ahronoth journalist Yigal Sarna.<\/p>\r\n
Netanyahu requested not to appear in court to testify, due to "multiple international political missions," but Judge Azaria Alkalai rejected the request.<\/p>\r\n
In his decision, the judge wrote: "There is no doubt that the plaintiff, as Prime Minister of Israel, is an extremely busy man, and it is undeniable that his occupations are of paramount importance.".<\/p>\r\n
At the same time, the plaintiffs must know that once they have submitted a request to the court, they must appear for the hearing on the scheduled date, in order to be questioned about their affidavits, and that for this purpose the plaintiff, the Prime Minister, must be respectful and free from his important duties on the date of the interrogation, especially since I determined in my decision that the plaintiff does not have to be present at the hearing except for the purpose of questioning about his affidavit, so in my opinion, this is not a long time.<\/p>\r\n
The decision also states that "the court's time is limited, so postponing the hearing, close to its scheduled date, will result in the waste of invaluable judicial time. Indeed, evidentiary hearings are scheduled by this session due to the workload for May 2018, and the hearing cannot be postponed to a later date.".<\/p>\r\n
The affair began with a post that Sarna published on Facebook, in which he described an incident that he claimed occurred during a trip by the Prime Minister's convoy on Highway 1. Sarna wrote that during the trip, the entire convoy was stopped and the Prime Minister was required to get out of the vehicle, while his wife Sarah made a mockery of the security apparatus and, in fact, the entire country, according to Sarna.<\/p>\r\n
Following this post, the couple filed a defamation lawsuit against him for 280,000 shekels. They claimed that this was a wrong that Serena committed against them "in a despicable, cynical, vile, evil and uninhibited manner, all with the (almost declared) goal of trying to shame the plaintiffs, shed their blood and whitewash their faces in public by publishing ugly lies, which do not contain a single shred of truth.".<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court judge rejected the request of the Prime Minister and his wife Sara not to appear in court in two days to be questioned about the affidavits they submitted in a defamation lawsuit against Yedioth Ahronoth journalist Yigal Sarna.","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[18516,18515,18518,18517],"class_list":["post-351861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-24","tag-18516","tag-18515","tag-18518","tag-18517"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n