Shin Bet chief says Netanyahu wants to make Israel a police state. What it means for country

The Print

23-04-2025

The affidavit—filed after judges halted Bar's firing by Netanyahu last month—alleges that the Shin Bet chief was told to conduct illegal espionage against democratic protests, obstruct the ongoing criminal trial of the Prime Minister, and disregard the courts as a constitutional crisis unfolds. The decision to fire Bar came even as Shin Bet investigated allegations that two of the Prime Minister's top aides received payoffs from the state of Qatar.
Earlier this week, the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal intelligence service, Ronen Bar, filed an explosive 31-page affidavit in the country's High Court of Justice, in essence accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of seeking to turn the country into a police state.
The Lord spoke to Moses,' so the Hebrew Bible records , 'saying, 'Send men to spy out the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the people of Israel.'' The twelve men he despatched returned, saying: 'We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.' The prospect of war against the Amalekites of the Negev, the Canaanites of the sea, and the Amorites of the hill country scared the spies, though. They falsely reported to the people: 'The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants.'
Few nations have stories of espionage—and its handmaidens, intrigue and deceit—so entwined with their origin myths. Few nations owe so much to their intelligence services for their survival, either.
Even as Israel began its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the eminent Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that 'a country that controls a hostile population of a million foreigners will necessarily be a Shin Bet state, with everything that this requires, with implications on education, freedom of speech and thought and on democratic governance. The corruption characterising every colonial regime will also infect the State of Israel.'
The bleak contents of Bar's affidavit are making many Israelis ask if the scholar might have been right.
The invisible shield
From a cluster of unimposing buildings in Jaffa, only just abandoned by their Palestinian owners, Lieutenant-Colonel Isser Harel began the task of securing the new Jewish state which had emerged in the Middle East in the summer of 1948. Formed in 1940 with training and resources from the British military intelligence service MI4, as well as the Special Operations Executive, Isser's old service, the Shai, had served as the intelligence arm of the Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary. Now, Shai was divided into three services, the Shin Bet, Mossad and military intelligence.
Things didn't begin well. Isser Be'eri, the commander of the Israeli Defence Forces' intelligence wing, was cashiered in 1949, for the wrongful execution of an innocent man scapegoated as a traitor. The military intelligence chief was sentenced to just a day's symbolic imprisonment, before which he was pardoned—but it was an early warning of the dangers of unchecked power.
Like all domestic intelligence services, historians Ian Black and Benny Morris have written, Shin Bet was called on to monitor public disaffection, particularly anger against post-war black-marketeering. In his private diary, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion recorded why he trusted Harel: 'There's hardly a family that doesn't buy on the black market. In Isser's house there's nothing to eat because he doesn't.'
From early in its existence, Shin Bet also found itself sucked into political intrigue. In 1949, Shin Bet was found to be conducting surveillance on members of the right-wing Herut Party, led by to-be Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
The bulk of Shin Bet's work, though, involved the control and surveillance of Israel's 200,000 Arab citizens, who lived, until 1966, under military administration, complete with curfews, pass laws and residence permits. Efforts by the Arabs to create their own political formations were stamped out by Shin Bet for fear they would begin a Soviet Union-backed war of national liberation.
Large numbers of sensational espionage cases peppered the media through the 1950s, an evident acknowledgment of the successes of Shin Bet. The reality of these cases, Black and Morris suggest, was somewhat less impressive than advertised. Nayifa Aqala, a Haifa resident, was arrested for purchasing postcards, from which Jordanian intelligence was purported to seek to extract the locations of military bases. Galilee resident Mahmoud Yasin, who volunteered to gather military intelligence for Syria, was defeated in his attempt to cross the Israeli border by a large porcupine, which attacked his brother.
Even though its battles with low-level border espionage provided Shin Bet with public colour and a reputation for derring-do, its real contribution was as a patient and skilful collector of intelligence on the Soviet Union. Immigrants from the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites were patiently interrogated, providing a wealth of information on the Bloc's technological capabilities and economic problems.
The Central Intelligence Agency, declassified documents reveal, was an avid consumer of Shin Bet's interrogations from 1951 on, which laid the foundations for a growing relationship between the two countries.
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The war inside
From the middle of 1967, emerging from the war that won Israel the West Bank and Gaza, Shin Bet began warning that despair had begun to turn to rage. The arrival of Israeli settlers looking for cheap land had provoked alarm, leading young volunteers to join the ranks of Al-Fatah insurgents. Shin Bet proved adept at manipulating clan rivalries to gather intelligence, and won the support of conservative traditional leaders like the mayor of Hebron, Sheikh Muhammad Ali Ja'abari, who feared the destruction armed insurgency might bring.
To the east, in Gaza, Shin Bet found itself facing a more determined insurgency. Ever since 1949, historian Jean-Pierre Filiu has written, the crowded enclave had received regular flows of weapons, compelling Israel to be drawn into repeated military incursions.
Fearing being drawn into an expensive counter-insurgency without end, Defence Minister General Moshe Dayan had withdrawn the Israeli army from the Gaza refugee camps in 1970—but that decision abandoned their control of organised crime and terrorist organisations.
Even though Shin Bet soon built a close relationship with the army, allowing it to conduct raids into Gaza's camps at short notice, the situation never fully stabilised. To make things worse, new challenges emerged. In 1972, after the massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Jewish rage surged. Amihai Paglin, the former operations chief of the Irgun militia, was arrested at the end of September after trying to smuggle weapons and explosives abroad for use in revenge attacks against Arabs. From 1977 on, Jewish extremism grew as a challenge.
The Israeli intelligence services remained on top of the challenge—but at a price. General Dayan had long lamented Shin Bet's use of administrative detentions instead of bringing regular criminal prosecutions, Black and Morris note, pointing to its corrosive impact on the legitimacy of Israeli rule in the West Bank. Torture grew more commonplace. And then, in 1986, senior officials of the agency were accused of murdering two hijackers of a bus in cold blood. Legal clemency was granted to the killers, leading many Israelis to worry about the nation's commitment to the rule of law.
Inside Shin Bet itself, many were questioning the paradigm of Israel's counter-terrorism campaign. 'I think my son, who served for three years in the paratroopers, participated in the conquest of Nablus at least two or three times,' argued Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon. 'Did it bring us victory? I don't think so. Did it create a better political reality? The tragedy of Israel's public security debate is that we don't realise that we face a frustrating situation in which we win every battle, but we lose the war.'
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The looming abyss
Four decades of constant war—and the barbaric Hamas assault of 2023—made questions of legality and the rule of law appear irrelevant to a large swathe of Israel's public. The corrosion of institutions this enabled, though, became increasingly apparent. In 2022, credible allegations emerged that Israel's police services had illegally used Pegasus spyware to monitor the phones of several heads of government ministries, a leading businessman, and co-defendant in the ongoing corruption trial of the Prime Minister.
'The future is bleak,' said Avraham Shalom, the Shin Bet director implicated in the 1986 bus murders. 'Where does it lead? To a change in the people's character? Because, if you put most of our young people in the Army, they'll see a paradox. They'll see that it strives to be a people's army, like the Nahal unit involved in building up the country. On the other hand, it's a brutal occupation force, similar to the Germans in World War II.'
Bar's affidavit shows Israel still has a core institutional resilience, and individuals of integrity, who can help prevent that outcome. The nation's fate depends on their success.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)