Netanyahu Takes On Israel’s Deep State

The firing of domestic security chief Ronen Bar is the latest battle in the war at home

Gadi Taub | Mar 31, 2025

Gadi Taub.  By Elekes Andor – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The fight against what Prime Minister Netanyahu has taken to calling Israel’s “deep state” 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—the country’s 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’s staff.

Bar’s 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’s intelligence turf, and so Bar’s 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’s apparent total lack of preparation might well be a trap.

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’s advice excluded any such preparations. The theater was sedated, rather than alert.

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.

Now, pieces of the puzzle are gradually surfacing, and we may finally have a plausible explanation, or a beginning of one, for Israel’s 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.

The cabinet’s decision to dismiss Bar, however, did not cite his failure on the night preceding the disaster. It cited his boss’s 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’s decision, the prime minister explained that distrust began with Bar’s 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.

This was not an isolated event. This was and still is Bar’s MO. He acts as if Israel’s 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’s 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’s authority to dismiss him. The decision to remove him, he said in the letter, was tinged with ulterior motives—an allusion to the ongoing investigation into alleged ties with Qatar among Netanyahu’s staff, which has so far produced no convincing evidence, as far as we know, and appears to have nothing to do with Netanyahu himself.

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’s concerns before “the proper forum” and according to what the “authorized judicial bodies” will decide.

Those less familiar with the surreal world of Israel’s juristocracy may rightly wonder what that “proper forum” and who the “authorized judicial bodies” 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 “the service is subject to the authority of the government” (Clause 4a), that “the prime minister is in charge of the service on behalf of the government” (Clause 4b) and also that “the government has the authority to terminate the tenure of the head of the service before the end of his term” (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 “proper forum” has already convened, and its decision was unanimous.

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.

Bar’s expectation is not primarily a matter of personal obligation, though. Rather, it is because Bar’s insubordination and the court’s boundless authority draw on the same spirit of contempt for electoral politics, and are part of the same bureaucratic power structure.

This story originally appeared in Tablet magazine, at tabletmag.com, and is reprinted with permission.