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The Israeli cabinet voted to dismiss the head of the internal security agency of Shin Bet, in a move likely to intensify the establishment between the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and the judicial authorities of the country.
Defying thousands of demonstrators outside the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, in the early hours of Friday, the cabinet voted unanimously to reject Ronen Bar, after Netanyahu declared that he had lost confidence in his domestic spy chief.
“Ronen Bar will end his role as head of Shin Bet on April 10, 2025 or when a permanent head of Bet Shin is appointed – according to the first possibility,” Netanyahu’s office said in a brief press release.
Tensions between Netanyahu and Bar have simmered since the devastating attack on Hamas on October 7, 2023 against Israel, which is widely considered as the worst security and failure of the intelligence of Israeli history.
Netanyahu fought to avoid a public inquiry into the events which led to the assault of Hamas and sought to blame the debacle on its security chiefs. Herzi Halevi, head of the army, was forced to go out earlier this month.
Like other senior security officials who were in office on October 7, Bar, who took office in 2021, recognized the responsibility of the failures which allowed the attack and indicated his intention to resign before the end of his mandate.
But he also accused Netanyahu of failures, publishing a provocative declaration this week by arguing that the governments of Netanyahu had defined politics towards Hamas for years before the attack and ignored the warnings of Shin Bet.
The tensions between the two men have also been exacerbated in recent weeks while Shin Bet has continued an investigation into lobbying on behalf of Qatar who would have been carried out by collaborators from the Prime Minister’s office.
Netanyahu rejected the investigation as politically motivated. But in a letter to the ministers published by the Israeli media Thursday evening, Bar warned that the dismissal now could “compromise” the investigation, which, according to him, would be a danger to the security of Israel.
Netanyahu announced its intention to withdraw the bar on Sunday, which prompted the prosecutor general of Israel, Gali Baharav -Miara – which Netanyahu also tries to dismiss – to warn the Prime Minister that he could not do so “until the factual and legal basis underlying your decision and your ability to deal with this problem is clarified”.
But the government rejected the warning of Baharav-Miara, the government secretary accusing him of “going beyond his authority” in a letter published Thursday by the Netanyahu office.
The release of the bar on the bar occurs in the midst of a broader confrontation between the far right government of Netanyahu and the judicial and judicial authorities of Israel, which began when the government has embarked on a controversial attempt to limit the powers of the judiciary in 2023, and has again flared in recent weeks.
Netanyahu’s Minister of Justice refused to recognize the authority of the new head of the Supreme Court, whose appointment to the government had delayed more than a year in the hope of installing a different named. The government also advances legislation designed to give it greater control over the appointment of judges of the Supreme Court.
At the same time, he tried to withdraw Baharav-Miara, the highest legal official in the country, who clashed several times with the government on questions ranging from political appointments to the judicial overhaul.
The Plan To Sack Bar launched demonstrations all week, with tens of thousands of people joining the rallies in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the police come up against demonstrators near the house of Netanyahu during another demonstration on Thursday.
Aharon Barak, the former head of the Supreme Court, said that he feared that the establishment between the government and the legal and judicial institutions of Israel could create a disastrous flaw in Israeli society.
“In the end, I fear that it is like a train that comes out of the tracks and plunges into a abyss causing a civil war,” he said in an interview with the Israeli website Ynet. “We must prevent the tyranny of the majority.”
