Ex-Shin Bet Chief Has No Right to Preach Morality – Even to Netanyahu -
No thank you, former Shin Bet security service chief Nadav Argaman. You cannot serve as a moral guide to upholding the law and democracy. Even if we set aside for a moment the threatening, mafia-style tone of your remarks to the prime minister, the tone that you and your agents use when addressing your Palestinian subjects, you have no right to preach morality to anyone, not even to Benjamin Netanyahu.
There is a great, justified yearning in Israel today to remove Netanyahu, but you are not the person who can save us from his regime. If the path to rehabilitation passes through the heads of the Shin Bet, then it is not the right path. The fact that you and your kind are the self-designated agents of change is irrefutable proof that in Israel there is no alternative and no opposition, certainly not from the left.
There are people who are disqualified from testifying about democracy and the rule of law. The heads of the Shin Bet – including you, the agency's director from 2016-2021 – are at the top of the list. Some of the Shin Bet's work is essential, some of it is unnecessary, contemptible and misbegotten, and in any case it is the polar opposite of upholding democracy and the law. Accordingly, you are not the person to teach democracy, not even to Netanyahu.
The insanity has reached the point where, as part of the war on Netanyahu, everything is permitted – even extortion, now. "If I reach the conclusion that the prime minister has decided to break the law, if there is no other choice, I will tell everything that I know and have kept myself from saying so far," Argaman told Israel's Channel 12 News. These words constitute extortion, there is no other way to describe them.
A former Shin Bet chief who threatens a prime minister with spilling the beans is no less a danger to democracy than Netanyahu is. Today, the Shin Bet chief threatens a prime minister whom the left sees as an enemy of the people, tomorrow he'll do the same to an enemy of the people in the eyes of the right – for example, someone who will order the dismantling of settlements. What would we say to that?
Argaman has appointed himself arbiter of the law, a new attorney. If the head of the secret services, the Securitate and the Stasi of Israel, decides that Netanyahu is acting unlawfully, he will reveal his dark side. If Argaman has seen Netanyahu's dark side, he had a duty to reveal it long ago. Why did he stay silent if the danger is so great? And how does Argaman know what is legal? Is the organization he headed a law-abiding one? Who is he kidding?
A Palestinian prisoner speaks with doctors at the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip last month, following his release by Israel.Credit: AFP/-
An organization cannot claim that all of its activities are legal if a significant proportion of its activities are based on threats, torture, extortion, informants and exploitation of the weaknesses of vulnerable people. Is it legal, never mind moral, to coerce people with cancer into collaborating?
The head of an agency that tyrannizes members of another people, sics soldiers and their dogs on them, usually without judicial oversight, causes numerous wrongful arrests and innumerable detentions for political reasons and uses illegal interrogation methods cannot preach morality.
Can the head of an organization that is responsible for the death under torture of detainees – since the war began, more than 60 Gazans have died in custody and during interrogation from torture, starvation and lack of medical care, most of them in the custody of the Israel Prison Service and the Israel Defense Forces and a smaller number in Shin Bet custody – dare speak of "upholding the law"?
Argaman got confused, as did the "anyone but Bibi" people who made him their hero. It is possible and necessary to act to remove Netanyahu. A former Shin Bet head cannot threaten that he will speak out in the event he suspects that Netanyahu is breaking the law. It is neither his job nor his jurisdiction.
And what will we ordinary Israelis do if we suspect that Argaman's Shin Bet breaks the law every day? And if we know what his "captains" do, who together with the army conduct night raids on the homes of Palestinians, some of whom are innocent and opponents of the regime, and abduct them from their homes and detain them for weeks and months without trial?
No one will threaten Argaman, but the head of an agency that commits such acts cannot threaten a prime minister nor teach democracy and the meaning of abiding by the law.