With move to fire Shin Bet chief, Netanyahu aims to tighten his personal control of Israel

Announcing his intention to fire Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plunged Israel back into the constitutional crisis he created in early 2023 with his bid to neuter the judiciary and to concentrate control of all branches of government in his own hands.

He pulled back from the abyss at that time, amid vast public opposition. Now he again risks tearing the nation apart, evidently unmoved by the fact that the rift in 2023 emboldened Israel’s enemies, and that Israel today is still in the midst of the subsequent war against Hamas, still trying to extricate its hostages from captivity in Gaza.

He may also have been looking across at the ease with which US President Donald Trump has been appointing loyalists to key roles, dismissing incumbents including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and determined that similar ruthlessness was appropriate and achievable here.

Ronen Bar was intending to resign anyway, having earlier this month issued the findings of a Shin Bet probe into the security agency’s failings surrounding Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion. Had the agency acted differently, Bar acknowledged when publishing that probe, “the massacre would have been avoided.”

In a statement issued hours after Netanyahu announced the move to dismiss him, Bar said he had refused previous pressure from Netanyahu to quit because he had intended to continue in his role until the hostages were returned, until he completed several “sensitive” investigations, and until his two potential successors were ready.

He also declared that “the prime minister’s expectation of a duty of personal loyalty, the purpose of which contradicts the public interest, is a fundamentally illegitimate expectation. It is contrary to the Security Agency Law and contrary to the statesmanlike values that lead the Shin Bet and its members.”

One TV commentator wondered on air whether these comments indicated that Bar intended to refuse to go — to barricade himself in his office, perhaps, with guards at the entrance. In response to several such reactions, “sources in the Shin Bet” issued a statement clarifying that Bar had been explaining why he had resisted the earlier pressure from Netanyahu to give up the job of his own accord. If the government indeed lawfully decides on his ouster, the sources said, “he will accept the decision.”

Netanyahu was not prepared to wait for Bar to determine the timing of his departure, does not want him to complete his “sensitive” investigations, and has little interest in his choice of potential successors. Having jettisoned defense minister Yoav Gallant in November, and accepted IDF chief Herzi Halevi’s resignation and departure 10 days ago, Netanyahu moved on to his next target, asserting that the Shin Bet chief had to go because of the “ongoing distrust” between them, “which has only grown over time.”

Tellingly, however, Netanyahu did not cite the October 7 failures as cause for dismissal. That would have heightened the focus on his own refusal to take personal responsibility for the horrors that Hamas perpetrated on his watch, his refusal even to countenance a state commission of inquiry to fully probe the failures and ensure no recurrence.

The prime minister will doubtless have calculated that Bar’s ouster would be opposed by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. And, indeed, in a two-sentence statement late Sunday, the government’s chief legal adviser told him flatly that the process of dismissal cannot begin “until the factual and legal basis underlying your decision is fully examined, as well as [the question of] your authority to address the matter at this time.” This latter clause may have been a reference to Netanyahu’s 2022 conflict of interest agreement, which permits him to serve as prime minister, even though he is on trial in three criminal cases, with the proviso that he is barred from involvement in the staffing of key posts in law enforcement agencies if this could potentially affect the outcome of his trial.

Baharav-Miara also noted “the extraordinary sensitivity of the issue, its unprecedented nature [- no government has ever fired the head of the Shin Bet], the concern that the process may be tainted by illegality and conflict of interest,” and the fact that the role of Shin Bet chief “is not a personal trust position serving the prime minister.”

But Netanyahu would not have been particularly fazed by her objections. He and his coalition colleagues are already working on firing Baharav-Miara too.

When he first attempted to dismiss defense minister Gallant, in March 2023, for the crime of warning that the coalition’s bid to neuter Israel’s judiciary was splitting the nation and emboldening Israel’s enemies, huge demonstrations persuaded Netanyahu both to rescind Gallant’s sacking and freeze the judicial overhaul legislation. When he moved to fire Gallant a second time, on November 5, 2024, after Hamas’s slaughter had shown the defense minister’s warnings to be horrifically prescient, public protest was far more muted, and the dismissal went ahead. Gallant, after all, was also centrally culpable in the failure to prevent the invasion.

Netanyahu will have anticipated major public protests over the move to dismiss Bar, but is unlikely to be deflected. He would not have initiated a step of such deep controversy, against the head of an agency central to Israel’s security, at a time of ongoing crisis, only to change his mind.

Ultimately, it will presumably fall to the justices of Israel’s Supreme Court to determine whether Netanyahu gets his wish, Bar is banished, and a successor of more absolute personal loyalty to Netanyahu is found.

Come the day, the justices may dismiss petitions, already promised by opposition politicians, asserting that Netanyahu is seeking to oust Bar in order to sabotage one of the agency’s “sensitive” investigations — its current probe into alleged illegal dealings with Qatar by prime ministerial aides. Netanyahu is not a suspect in that case, the justices may reason, and the investigation could continue no matter who runs the agency.

They may similarly reject the claim, raised in the attorney general’s brief letter, of a conflict of interest. They may rebuff her concern that Netanyahu is acting as though the job of Shin Bet chief is one of “personal trust,” to be handed out in some kind of monarchial dispensation.

But if the justices were to do none of those things, and instead rule his dismissal of Bar illegal, Netanyahu could simply continue the legislative process his coalition has again renewed in recent weeks — to radically constrain the powers of the Supreme Court, enable the political majority to reverse its rulings, and eventually cement all power in the hands of the political majority, with him at its helm.

Naftali Bennett, the former and would-be future prime minister, said trying to fire Bar was Netanyahu’s latest move to avoid his “ultimate responsibility” for October 7. “The State of Israel will not be able to recover without his resignation,” Bennett said.

But the former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, an opposition politician, a former war cabinet observer and a father bereaved in the ongoing war, recognized that this is not going to happen.

Accusing Netanyahu of carrying out “a purge” of Israel’s security and legal chiefs without concern for the good of the state, Eisenkot called for a “mass public and political struggle” to rapidly replace Netanyahu democratically. The prime minister, he said, had “forfeited the moral right to continue in his post.”