Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar responded to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s announcement on Sunday of his intention to dismiss him this week by saying he has no intention of leaving his position.

Bar claimed that Netanyahu’s decision to remove him is not based on his failures regarding the October 7 massacre and that he intends to remain in his position until the return of all the hostages and the completion of several investigations. However, after a backlash, the Shin Bet later issued a statement saying that if the government decides to fire Bar, he will “respect the law.”

As expected, following Netanyahu’s announcement, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara sent a letter to the Prime Minister saying that he is not permitted to fire Bar unless she determines that the dismissal is “legal.”

The responses of Bar and Baharav-Miara were widely slammed by government officials, with one political official saying that Bar “has become confused as to who is subordinate to whom. The Prime Minister’s lack of confidence in the Shin Bet chief is not a personal matter but a distinctly public matter and his attempt to cling to his position harms the Shin Bet and the security of the state.”

The official continued by saying that Bar’s insistence that he will determine when he will end his position is “how he decided on the night of October whom not to wake up and whom not to alert [a reference to his failure to wake up Netanyahu]. The Shin Bet chief repeats the lie that he warned the political echelon about the Hamas attack, while the protocols prove the exact opposite: on October 1, 2023, seven days before the massacre, the Shin Bet chief said that Hamas was deterred and that it should be granted economic benefits to maintain calm. The Shin Bet chief even repeated these claims three days before the massacre.”

Justice Minister Yariv Levin slammed Baharav-Miara’s letter, stating: “The Shin Bet Law explicitly states that the government is authorized to terminate the tenure of the head of the service before the end of his term. The Attorney General should also be familiar with this law. In case anyone is confused, Israel is a democracy, and everyone in it, including the Attorney General, is subject to the law.”

Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich responded by stating that Bar should have gone home on October 8, 2023. “In what normal country would you even need a special reason to fire the head of an intelligence organization who is personally responsible for a terrible intelligence failure that led to the greatest disaster in the history of the State of Israel? Maybe if Bar had guarded Gaza’s threshold instead of some illusory political threshold, the October 7 massacre would have been thwarted.”

Otzma Yehudit chairman Itamar Ben Gvir stated: “Since the Attorney General herself is in the midst of an impeachment process, perhaps it is important to remind her that ‘conflict of interest’ also applies to her adversarial actions against the government and its head. The time has come to put an end to the rule of the deep state, and first and foremost, to expedite the dismissal of the Attorney General.”

The Torat Lechima organization responded: “The Attorney General opposes the dismissal of the Shin Bet chief and the Shin Bet chief will protect the Attorney General in case they try to fire her. There are two political players here who are busy with one thing – preserving the power of the left in state institutions and controlling its citizens.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)