{"id":120281,"date":"2025-05-07T17:05:16","date_gmt":"2025-05-07T15:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=120281"},"modified":"2025-05-07T07:47:27","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T05:47:27","slug":"05-05-111","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=120281","title":{"rendered":"Netanyahu Takes On Israel\u2019s Deep State"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Netanyahu Takes On Israel\u2019s Deep State<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Gadi Taub<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The firing of domestic security chief Ronen Bar is the latest battle in the war at home<\/strong><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n

Ronen Bar, the recently dismissed head of Shin Bet, Israel’s security service<\/em><\/span>
\nTablet Magazine; original images: Israeli Government Press Office; Oren Ziv\/AFP via Getty Images<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The fight against what Prime Minister Netanyahu has taken to calling Israel\u2019s \u201cdeep state\u201d is now in full swing. It reached a climax on Thursday, March 20, late in the evening, when the cabinet unanimously voted to dismiss Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet\u2014the country\u2019s domestic security service. The termination is to take effect on the earlier of two dates: April 10, or when a replacement is found. Bar is not going down without a fight, however, and has retaliated by stepping up an investigation against the prime minister\u2019s staff.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Bar\u2019s removal is long overdue. For starters, he is probably the person most directly responsible for the disaster of Oct. 7. Gaza is the Shin Bet\u2019s intelligence turf, and so Bar\u2019s advice to refrain from raising the level of alert on the night before the massacre was naturally accepted by the IDF. All remained quiet on the Gaza front as dawn broke on that Sabbath. So quiet, says former Shin Bet operative Yizhar David, who was privy to some of the relevant information, that Mohammed Deif, who commanded the invasion, postponed the attack for fear that Israel\u2019s apparent total lack of preparation might well be a trap.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there was no trap. Despite the accumulating signs of an impending assault nobody alerted the soldiers, sleeping soundly in their beds, or the party goers still dancing as the sun was rising at the Nova Festival, or those on guard duty at the nearby kibbutzim. The handful of tanks at the theater, the soldiers stationed in bases around the fence, and the volunteers on security duty in the adjoining kibbutzim could have stopped or at least drastically curtailed the invasion had they only been told to stay put. Bar\u2019s advice excluded any such preparations. The theater was sedated, rather than alert.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ever since Oct. 7 Israelis have been asking themselves: Why? Sure, hindsight is always 20-20. But why, despite the accumulating indications, was the level of alert not raised, if only to be on the safe side? And why, Israelis also ask, did the brass who were concerned enough to hold late night consultations, not wake up the minister of defense and the prime minister? Since both Bar and the then IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevy have remained consistently silent on this, conspiracy theories about acts of betrayal abound.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Now, pieces of the puzzle are gradually surfacing, and we may finally have a plausible explanation, or a beginning of one, for Israel\u2019s startling inaction. And that explanation, as we shall see, is damning to Bar in the extreme. Which may explain why, despite his colossal failure, he is fighting to stay at his job where he can continue to control the disclosure of much of the evidence against him.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Netanyahu is now attempting to correct what was perhaps the greatest miscalculation of his long political career.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The cabinet\u2019s decision to dismiss Bar, however, did not cite his failure on the night preceding the disaster. It cited his boss\u2019s lack of confidence in him. Netanyahu himself made sure the move was publicly understood that way. In a video released on his social media accounts two days after the cabinet\u2019s decision, the prime minister explained that distrust began with Bar\u2019s insubordination in the wee hours of Oct. 7, when he decided to keep both the minister of defense and the prime minister out of the decision-making process.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This was not an isolated event. This was and still is Bar\u2019s MO. He acts as if Israel\u2019s internal secret service is not accountable to anyone but himself, as if it were free to operate in the shadows outside the control and oversight of Israel\u2019s elected government. He displayed the same contemptuous spirit of insubordination when he ignored a summons by the cabinet to answer questions at the March 20 meeting that decided the future of his career. Instead, he sent a letter in which he point-blank refused to recognize the cabinet\u2019s authority to dismiss him. The decision to remove him, he said in the letter, was tinged with ulterior motives\u2014an allusion to the ongoing investigation into alleged ties with Qatar among Netanyahu\u2019s staff, which has so far produced no convincing evidence, as far as we know, and appears to have nothing to do with Netanyahu himself.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In other words, not only does Bar feel he is not accountable to the civil authorities, he also seems to believe that they instead should be accountable to him and that he can bully them as he pleases with contrived investigations. Bar added in his letter that he will not leave his job, and will only lay out his responses to the cabinet\u2019s concerns before \u201cthe proper forum\u201d and according to what the \u201cauthorized judicial bodies\u201d will decide.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Those less familiar with the surreal world of Israel\u2019s juristocracy may rightly wonder what that \u201cproper forum\u201d and who the \u201cauthorized judicial bodies\u201d might be. The law, in point of fact, is very clear about the forum which holds the authority to dismiss the head of Shin Bet. The 2002 law which governs the service states in no uncertain terms that \u201cthe service is subject to the authority of the government\u201d (Clause 4a), that \u201cthe prime minister is in charge of the service on behalf of the government\u201d (Clause 4b) and also that \u201cthe government has the authority to terminate the tenure of the head of the service before the end of his term\u201d (Clause 3c). In the debates leading to the final formulation of this law, Shin Bet representatives strongly objected to this language, but the legislators, and the attorney general at the time, Menachem Mazuz, insisted on strong wording, adding that the cabinet is not required to explain its reasons for the dismissal. So, clearly, the \u201cproper forum\u201d has already convened, and its decision was unanimous.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So why do we have a so-called crisis? The answer is that Israel has a supergovernment that exists above our elected government in the form of a hyperactivist Supreme Court, that can overrule all and any action by the executive and legislature. Bar was instrumental in protecting the Supreme Court from the now-defunct judicial reform which attempted to limit its power. Along with other heads of security services, he refused to state that in case of a constitutional crisis, if the court moved to strike down the reform, he would abide by the law and obey the cabinet. The fear of a coup was real and it played a major role in defeating the reform. Bar now apparently expects the court to reciprocate.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bar\u2019s expectation is not primarily a matter of personal obligation, though. Rather, it is because Bar\u2019s insubordination and the court\u2019s boundless authority draw on the same spirit of contempt for electoral politics, and are part of the same bureaucratic power structure.<\/span><\/p>\n

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There is a direct line connecting Bar\u2019s insubordination when he helped undermine the government\u2019s judicial reform before Oct. 7, his disregard for the chain of command in the early hours of Oct. 7 when he did not wake the prime minister, and his current defiance of the civil authority to which the Shin Bet is subordinate by law. Bar, like many of his fellow progressive government employees, and many in the press and academia, has convinced himself he is here to save us Israelis from ourselves. In Bar, Israel\u2019s woke elites have found an important ally: a chief of the internal secret service, able to act in the gray areas beyond the law, willing to help protect them\u2014indeed, all of us\u2014from the menace of democratic politics. This mission has taken precedence over Bar\u2019s official task: protecting us from subversion and terrorism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bar may or may not be right to assume that the court will side with him against the cabinet and attempt to force the prime minister to retain him. It has already issued an intermediary injunction\u2014with no basis whatever in the law\u2014to \u201cfreeze\u201d the cabinet\u2019s decision. But Bar, most probably, is wrong to believe this will save him. Because his MO belongs to the pre-Oct. 7 world, and that world is now gone for good.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Netanyahu seems to understand this, and consequently has proceeded with interviewing candidates for Bar\u2019s job. The video in which Netanyahu explained the reasons for the Shin Bet chief\u2019s dismissal began with a clear declaration: \u201cRonen Bar will not remain head of Shabak\u201d (the Hebrew acronym for the Shin Bet). The prime minister would never have chosen such a defiant path two years ago during the fight over the judicial reform.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the video, Netanyahu also directly tackled Bar\u2019s charge that there are ulterior motives behind his dismissal. The prime minister argued, based on the timeline, that the move to dismiss Bar was set in motion before the Qatar investigation began and that, in fact, the opposite of Bar\u2019s accusation is true: The dismissal was not designed to stop the investigation (which indeed it won\u2019t). Rather the investigation was launched to preempt the dismissal. In other words, Bar has taken a page from James Comey\u2019s Russian collusion playbook: He is trying to protect himself by tying his chief\u2019s hand with a contrived investigation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For now the investigation is formally directed only against the prime minister\u2019s staff\u2014much like the early days of the Russia hoax. But after Netanyahu interviewed and announced his candidate to head the Shin Bet, Bar pushed back by escalating his Qatar investigation, with a help from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara\u2014herself is next in line to be dismissed. Jonathan Urich, Netanyahu\u2019s close aide, was arrested on March 31, and Netanyahu himself was whisked out of the court room where he was testifying in his own trial, for questioning. The allegations against Urich, says lawyer and retired senior police officer Avi Weiss, are based on no law (Israel has no equivalent to the Foreign Agents Registration Act in the U.S.), and there is no accusation of espionage. Moreover, he says, Bar and Baharav-Miara have an obvious conflict of interest. Both are working to pressure the government that is ousting them from their positions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s certainly how Netanyahu\u2019s party sees it. In a strongly worded statement, the Likud accused \u201cthe prosecution and the head of the Shin Bet\u201d of conducting \u201csham investigations in secrecy under a gag order, aiming to prevent the dismissal of the Shin Bet chief.\u201d The goal, the statement added, \u201cis to carry out a coup through arrest warrants\u201d and \u201creplace the will of the people with the rule of bureaucrats.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Democracies should not need reminders of how dangerous secret services can be to democratic institutions. Journalist Amit Segal recently exposed a directive from Bar to spy on the Israeli police force in order to track \u201cthe spread of Kahanism into law enforcement institutions.\u201d The late Meir Kahane\u2019s Kach party is banned in Israel and is designated as a foreign terrorist organization in the U.S. Since the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is in charge of the police, is routinely labeled a Kahanist, what the directive means in practice is that Bar is spying, with no probable cause, on a member of the cabinet to which he is supposed to answer, and intimidating police personnel into insubordination, by insinuating that adherence to the minister\u2019s directives could be considered possible \u201cKahanism.\u201d This behavior has raised questions about whether it is a good idea for Netanyahu\u2019s personal bodyguard to remain under Bar\u2019s command. Such concerns were further exacerbated when Nadav Argaman, Bar\u2019s predecessor, threatened to reveal information from private conversations with Netanyahu, should he, Argaman, reach the conclusion that the prime minister has decided \u201cto break the law\u201d (by which he seems to mean, defy the Supreme Court in the matter of Bar\u2019s dismissal).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Since the well-financed, permanent anti-Netanyahu protest movement is part of the country\u2019s network of unelected elite power centers, it adopted Bar\u2019s \u201culterior motives\u201d narrative from the get-go. A recent rally featured a Netanyahu look-alike holding a Qatari flag, kneeling before a man clad in traditional Qatari garb, who is handing him fake money. But that was the least surreal part of the wave of demonstrations in support of Bar\u2019s insubordination in the name of democracy. Apparently, the protesters, the left, and much of the press want to save democracy by adopting the totalitarian model where politicians answer to the secret police instead of wielding authority over it.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Absurd as it may sound, elevating the secret police above electoral politics in the name of democracy stems from the very heart of our woke elite\u2019s ethos. Appointed civil servants imagine themselves the responsible adults in the room, boldly stepping forward to protect \u201cthe public interest\u201d from what the public believes to be its interest\u2014and from the elected officials the public has chosen to carry out its will.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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These elites\u2014across the security establishment, the bureaucracy, the media, academia, and the business world\u2014have succeeded once so far in their bid to subdue the governing majority coalition and defeat its plan for judicial reform. What the protest movement, Bar, the court and the press are trying to do now, is resurrect that successful antireform coalition. Their drive is not surprising, having witnessed their extra-electoral power structure during that struggle in the 10 months that preceded Oct. 7.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Apparently, the protesters, the left, and much of the press want to save democracy by adopting the totalitarian model where politicians answer to the secret police.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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But the severity of the national disaster on that day revealed the hollowness and recklessness of these elites. For Oct. 7 was not just an intelligence and operational failure of the armed forces. It was also an indictment of the antireform strategy: the scorched earth tactics that played fast and loose with our security by arranging mass walkouts of army reservists, as if we were not a nation surrounded by terrorists who clamor daily for our blood. Not least, it discredited the idea that civil servants were merely expert \u201cgatekeepers,\u201d as they have come to describe themselves, guarding the public interest against the excesses of ignorant and corrupt politicians.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bar proved to be the very opposite of the responsible adult in the room. The pretense that he is saving us from ourselves rings hollow after he failed at his actual job\u2014protecting us from our enemies. In fact, there is a causal link here: Bar failed to protect us from our enemies precisely because he was too busy saving us from ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Behind Bar\u2019s self-image as a \u201cgatekeeper\u201d is a worldview, shared by the rest of Israel\u2019s woke elites, which consists of two complementary elements: an almost religious attachment to the \u201cpeace process\u201d and the so-called \u201ctwo-state solution,\u201d and a concurrent contempt for democracy which inherently distrusts the patriotic masses and the politicians they elect. The elites, our betters, are here to save the prospect of peace from the warmongering jingoistic hordes and their irresponsible political representatives.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The consequences of this view of Israel\u2019s internal politics hardly stops at Israel\u2019s borders, though\u2014the result being a complete inversion of the observable realities of our region. Bar imagines our politicians as reckless, dangerous hawks, which also more or less requires him to imagine Hamas to be strategically moving to greater pragmatic moderation. He thinks of our government as wild and irrational, a view that is premised on imagining Hamas leaders as rational actors susceptible to economic incentives. Therefore, Bar could not imagine them starting a war, and his assessments in the months preceding the war consistently reflected that bias, even as he was haunted by the specter of Israel\u2019s government starting one.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In other words, our chief of the internal secret service had everything exactly backwards. In the face of accumulating intelligence, Ronen Bar and Herzi Halevy were busy saving us from ourselves, not from Hamas. They were eager to prevent an escalation which they thought could be triggered by \u201cmiscalculation\u201d on the part of their civil bosses. \u201cMiscalculation\u201d has become their watchword to refer to the danger of overreaction to raw intelligence data, which may plunge us all into a war they assumed nobody wanted\u2014save perhaps those evil messianic, Kahanist, proto-fascists in our own cabinet.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Based on this bias, says former Shin Bet officer Yizhar David, the late-night meetings Bar convened at Shin Bet headquarters concluded that Hamas was raising its own level of readiness out of fear of an impending Israeli attack. It\u2019s not hard to see why a self-appointed gatekeeper would want to keep such information out of the wrong hands. Why let a deplorable, warmongering prime minister interfere with the efforts by responsible adults to delicately defuse a possible \u201cmiscalculation\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And here, says David, lies the answer to the most nagging question of all: Why did the chiefs not raise the level of alert, or at least quietly inform the soldiers of the possibility, however remote, of impending danger? Astoundingly Bar\u2019s message to the IDF was a recommendation to leave the theater quiet, lest raising the level of alert would reinforce Hamas\u2019 fear of an imminent attack and lead to accidental escalation. They kept the raw intelligence from the IDF units around the fence for the same reason they kept it away from the cabinet: to prevent escalation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Bar\u2019s bid to stay on as head of Shin Bet, in defiance of the law and the cabinet, and despite his colossal failure, is wholly reliant on the antireform coalition of gatekeepers. But not only has the gatekeeping philosophy taken a massive hit, the constellation that composed it is also falling apart: the flow of money to the protest movement from the Biden administration has been replaced by the new administration\u2019s inquiry into the use of this money by the anti-Netanyahu forces; the widening of Netanyahu\u2019s wartime coalition has made this government more stable; the need a wartime prime minister has for a head of Shin Bet he can trust is obvious to most Israelis; there\u2019s a new IDF chief of staff, general Eyal Zamir, and a new chief of police who will not let the anti-Netanyahu permanent protest disrupt public life in the middle of a war. And here is one more sign of the new times: Nadav Argaman who threatened Netanyahu on TV with disclosing secret information has been summoned by the police for questioning on suspicion of attempted extortion.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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There is still the confrontational, all-powerful attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, and, of course, the Supreme Court. They may succeed in fomenting more chaos, but they can\u2019t rewind the clock to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo. Baharav-Miara is herself operating on borrowed time, and even the Supreme Court, the most important bastion of the juristocracy, is now being challenged\u2014in a minor way, to be sure, but still symbolically important. The Knesset has passed a law that changes the composition of the committee that appoints judges, slightly augmenting the power of elected politicians at the expense of the lawyers\u2019 guild.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Perhaps more important than all these changes is Netanyahu\u2019s decision to lead the charge against the deep state. In doing so, he is now attempting to correct what was perhaps the greatest miscalculation of his long political career. For years he thought that he could make do with the defiant upper echelons of the security establishment, including insubordinate heads of security services, and with the imperial Supreme Court, with its juristocratic auxiliaries in the executive, including a politicized prosecution. That calculation proved detrimental to Israel\u2019s democracy, to the right\u2019s ability to govern, and to Netanyahu\u2019s personal fate as a target of a politically weaponized criminal prosecution. He has now made the decision to tackle the problem at its roots, rather than skirmishing with the tentacles of the deep state over specific issues on an ad hoc basis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Whether Netanyahu will succeed in reestablishing democratic sovereignty in Israel is dependent, to a large extent, on the outcome of the war. As things now stand, victory over the Iranian axis of evil has become the precondition for any new birth of freedom for Israel\u2019s citizens.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Gadi Taub<\/strong> is an author, historian, and op-ed columnist. He is co-host of Tablet\u2019s Israel Update<\/a> podcast.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Netanyahu Takes On Israel\u2019s Deep State Gadi Taub The firing of domestic security chief Ronen Bar is the latest battle in the war at home Ronen Bar, the recently dismissed head of Shin Bet, Israel’s security service Tablet Magazine; original images: Israeli Government Press Office; Oren Ziv\/AFP via Getty Images The fight against what Prime […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120281"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=120281"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120987,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120281\/revisions\/120987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=120281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=120281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=120281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}