Can an employee in Israel legally record a conversation with their employer?

The Secret Monitoring Law turns entirely on whether the person recording is a participant. Section 2 makes secret monitoring of another person's conversation an offence carrying up to five years imprisonment, and Section 13 of the same Law makes evidence obtained by unlawful monitoring inadmissible. A participant recording falls outside the prohibition, so it is both lawful to make and admissible to file. The Labor Court will still test the recording for authenticity and completeness, and a party who produces a short edited extract without the full file weakens its own evidence. Employers face the mirror image of this rule, because monitoring employees among themselves engages both the Secret Monitoring Law and the Protection of Privacy Law 5741-1981.

For a foreign employee in Israel, a recording is often the only proof of what was actually said at a pre-dismissal hearing or in a discussion about unpaid salary, since many Israeli workplaces produce no written minutes. The recording should cover the whole meeting, be preserved in its original file format with the metadata intact, and be filed with a full transcript in Hebrew. Our guide on employee monitoring and workplace privacy in Israel explains the limits that run the other way. Circulating or publishing the recording is a separate risk, because the Protection of Privacy Law can make publication of a private conversation actionable even where the recording itself was perfectly lawful.

From the full guide: Employee Monitoring and Workplace Privacy in Israel: What Employers Can and Cannot Do

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