The witness, Mr. Elkabetz: That's not right. It's as if I thought from the first moment that Hadas and certainly Razi too, as if the State Attorney's Office came and said we, we, first of all, the Ministry of Defense came and said we can only defend this. So I said no, it won't arise and it won't happen. I waged a very big struggle. I went all the way to the Director General of the Ministry of Defense. Unfortunately, I didn't succeed. What I did succeed afterwards was that they came to some kind of insight that the state would not protect them, but would allow them to hire lawyers and allow them to do it. And besides the Director General of the Ministry of Defense, Adam, I also waged a struggle against Mrs. Litman of the State Attorney's Office. It's as if I said there's no way. In the end, you're as if you're going to cause the station to close and collapse, as if in the end there can't be a situation where we don't have a defense. Even if she made a mistake or even if there was a problem with her judgment. There has to be protection. There is no protection, by the way, I also said this about freelancers who broadcast on Ariel Segal's show, and the Ministry of Defense tried to disavow the person who broadcast there, who later was Sara, Galit Stiel and that. And there's no such thing. I always said we need protection. If you don't protect the freelancers, then in the end, in the end, there is no right to exist for broadcasting. So don't broadcast. So broadcast "Mother's Voice, " as soon as you go for the journalistic component, you have to give them protection, and that's what I did at Kol Israel and Reshet Bet and Yedioth and wherever I was. There's no such thing. You can't leave them out."
- Policy considerations join the other considerations that I have enumerated. Expanding the protection envelope to an investigative journalist, even if he makes a mistake in the way he works, is in line with the public interest in protecting freedom of the press, about which the Supreme Court, President Y. Amit recently said in the case Essenheim, paragraphs 17-18:
"Freedom of the press and the public's right to know are derived from the constitutional right to freedom of expression, which in turn is a subsidiary right of the constitutional right to human dignity. The basis of this proceeding is the clear assumption that freedom of the press is a protected value, a public interest that must be treated as a weighty consideration.