Analysis | Netanyahu Government Planting Agents in the Shin Bet Signals Start of Its Internal Unraveling - Israel News - Haaretz.com
The gag order on what is being referred to as the new security scandal lasted for less than 24 hours, from the moment the first details leaked until it was partially lifted on Tuesday morning. In essence, the investigation relates to suspicions about information leaked to two journalists and a government minister without authorization. But the way in which it is evolving and escalating indicates that something deeper is happening here.
This is a direct clash between the Shin Bet security service and the most prominent (and apparently the most popular) journalist in the country, Amit Segal from Channel 12 News, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ongoing efforts to oust Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar in the background.
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Since the report came out, claims are being made of systematic political persecution of rightists by Bar. Two more important facts should be kept in mind in order to understand the context. The first is that Netanyahu and the far right are waging a planned and broad campaign to undermine the state institutions and to exacerbate the internal rifts in Israeli society.
Second, the prime minister has a specific personal interest in accelerating Bar's ouster (currently frozen by order of the High Court of Justice) given the Shin Bet's advancement of the investigation into Qatargate, in which two top staffers from the Prime Minister's Office are suspects.
Although the new affair does not touch directly on the prime minister for now, it is impossible to view it as being completely detached from Netanyahu's war on Bar, on Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, on the security agencies and the law enforcement authorities.
Shin Bet director Ronen Bar, 2022.Credit: Moti Milrod
The announcement from the Department of Internal Police Investigations (Mahash), the Justice Ministry department that investigates police misconduct, which is overseeing the investigation together with the Shin Bet, said that on April 9, a Shin Bet officer was arrested on suspicion of committing security offenses.
The man, a reservist identified for now as A., is suspected of using his position and access to classified documents to provide information to unauthorized persons. In the first days of the investigation, until Monday, he was also barred from meeting with a lawyer. Mahash said that, unlike in the Qatari affair, in this case, testimony was not taken from journalists.
It has so far come to light that the Shin Bet officer is suspected of passing information to Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, a more recent but fervent Netanyahu loyalist, to journalist Segal and to Israel Hayom journalist Shirit Avitan Cohen. On March 23, Segal reported that the Shin Bet is pursuing an investigation into suspected infiltration of Kahanist elements into the police, on the basis of Section 7A of the Shin Bet Law that defines the agency's purpose as fighting "subversion of the orders of government and democracy."
Minister Amichai Chikli in court on Tuesday.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
The Shin Bet investigation dealt with moves by the police, in coordination with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, regarding decision-making on arrangements for prayer and visits to the Temple Mount. It is suspected that similar information was also passed to Chikli.
Two days later, Avitan Cohen published an article in Israel Hayom about what she described as "documents of Bar's strategy in the years preceding the October 7 massacre." Her article blamed the Shin Bet for the "conception" that enabled the massacre while recommending economic aid for Gaza and containment of the threat from Hamas.
Under questioning, the arrested Shin Bet officer claimed that he acted as he did in order to make public "information of the highest public importance that was concealed by the Shin Bet."
Segal hinted on Monday in a post on X that the Shin Bet listened in via wiretapping on journalists' conversations on the matter. The Shin Bet denies this and says that such a move requires an extensive series of approvals that it never sought. Monday morning, after the gag order was partially lifted, Segal expressed himself in stronger terms.
He wrote: "In the end, the story is very simple: Ronen Bar told the attorney general a chilling story about Kahanism taking over the police as seen on Tisha B'Av on the Temple Mount. The attorney general wished to look into it and then, embarrassingly, it came out from Bar's subordinates that no such thing happened. Bar, in an attempt to repair his standing in the eyes of the attorney general and of his people, launched a secret and unprecedented investigation of the police… And this investigation also ended with nothing."
Journalist Amit Segal in 2022.Credit: Emil Salman
Segal said the attorney general included "secret and false information" provided by Bar in her explanations to the High Court of Justice in the hearing on the petitions regarding his ouster. "The story is reported and greatly embarrasses them," Segal maintained.
He continued, "They have tools to hunt the one who exposed them and so they thew him in detention without a lawyer. This is obstruction? How is it possible to obstruct an investigation that came up with nothing? When there are no sources, it's hard to identify them… A serious organization would be conducting a deep reckoning about what made it plunge head-first into a useless investigation, not doubling the size of its gamble."
However, sources knowledgeable about the affair say that the information about the connection between the police and the Israel Prison Service with Kahanist elements (the two organizations identified with Kahana's Kach party have been legally classified as terror organizations since 1994) did not come to the Shin Bet's Jewish Division from an order from above by Bar.
They say this was not a full investigation but rather a preliminary collection of intelligence in light of a suspicion that arose, and the intention was to investigate the degree of penetration by Kahanists into the police and the prison service. And that this is what the agency is authorized to deal with. The collection of information was done while maintaining distance from Ben-Gvir and his people.
Bar, they say, was informed of the details given the sensitivity of the matter and asked to authorize the continuation of the examination. "What they're doing is demonizing Bar," they said. "The reality is exactly the opposite. Because of the sensitivity, an investigation was not opened versus [Ben-Gvir], whereas in another case it might have been right to open one."
The report and Segal's accusations predictably spurred wild verbal attacks by ministers and coalition MKs against Bar and the Shin Bet. Netanyahu, in a statement issued by Likud, claimed that Bar and Baharav-Miara "turned parts of the Shin Bet into a private militia," no less.
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara with Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich accused Bar of planning a "violent regime coup," threatened to boycott a discussion attended by Bar at the Gaza Division (the invitation was canceled) and proposed that A., the suspect, be appointed as the next head of the agency. Chikli called the suspect a "hero of Israel, an exposer of corruption, who was right to take a risk versus a pair of bureaucrats who got into a dangerous vertigo." The Bibi-ist propaganda channel, Channel 14, decided that from now on, a black flag would appear on its broadcast logo "until Bar's ouster."
Bear in mind the changing and instrumental relationship of Netanyahu and his supporters to leaks. When convenient for him, he demands that their sources be investigated. When it is less convenient for him, as in the affair of the leak of the presentation to the cabinet about Operation Protective Edge in 2014, he ignores it.
Just recently it was reported that he admitted that his adviser Yonatan Urich who is a suspect in the Qatargate affair leaked classified information at his instruction. Prior to that, another spokesman of his, Eli Feldstein, was arrested as well as military intelligence officer Ari Rosenfeld and other military intelligence people (as well as Urich) were questioned on suspicion of leaking classified documents to the German magazine Bild.
Leaks, including the classified kind, are the vital oxygen for the existence of a free press. As long as the security information was submitted and approved by the military censor, it is not the reporting journalist's business how it got to him. At the same time, the rules of the game are well-known. At a time when in the army, due to its size and a lack of discipline, it is hard to enforce the prohibition about holding ties with the media, the circumstances in the Shin Bet, which is smaller and more secret, are different and the organization has a greater tendency to investigate leaks from within its ranks.
Apparently, Segal's report included a photo of a secret document that came out of Bar's office, further heightened the latter's motivation to investigate and identify the source of the leak. Document leaks from within an espionage agency are not trivial. In the Shin Bet, it is rare enough to attest to the start of an internal unraveling, with the government using agents within the organization to suit its needs.
Now the Shin Bet chief is not only in direct conflict with Netanyahu, Smotrich, Chikli and the poison machine, but is also entering another clash with Segal. Of all the figures involved in this affair, it's hard to say who is the most determined and combative. And while these clashes keep the media fixated, massive harm is being done to the Shin Bet, which the right is insistent on dragging into the mud as part of its chaotic war to protect the prime minister.
The current affair is not the first of its kind, and it comes on the heels of the attacks on the head of the Shin Bet's Jewish Division at the start of the month. The current uproar obviously serves Netanyahu too, since all the attention and coverage it is getting once more diverts discussion from the failures of the war in Gaza and the failure to return the 59 hostages who remain there.