It would be easy to get lost in the disparate chronologies and smaller sensational narrative points of the battle between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar, thereby missing the big picture: from the moment Hamas took hostages on October 7 and the moment Netanyahu decided that, despite that disaster on his watch, he would not resign and would seek reelection, he and Bar were on a collision course with history.
There are a number of issues relating to the rule of law that possibly determined the final timing of their public breakup, and I analyze those issues in a separate article, but the broader October 7 and hostages issues made a clash of the titans inevitable.
Normally, the head of the Shin Bet is one of the closest advisers to the prime minister.
He not only protects the country from terrorism, but also is responsible for the prime minister's personal protection and his agents experience the premier and his family in the most up close and personal way possible.
Literally, the Shin Bet chief and his staff are under orders to take a bullet for Netanyahu.
October 7 changed everything.
Initially, the expected position of Netanyahu would have been similar to that of Golda Meir after the Yom Kippur War, and to his top defense officials, to resign before his term expired and to step down from seeking reelection.
Had he followed this custom, he might not have opposed the much-needed state commission of inquiry.
Such a commission will not help his political legacy, but if anything, the commission might disappoint some of his critics, placing some responsibility on him as: the architect of containing Hamas, of Qatar paying Hamas, and because of security problems caused by his judicial overhaul – but placing a lot of responsibility on the defense establishment.
Now, when he attacks the defense establishment, it is seen as self-serving and political.
Netanyahu saw 'state inquiry as a moral political danger'
A state inquiry would probably find that many of the harsh critiques of the defense establishment are true, especially given that the IDF and Shin Bet themselves think so and have said so.
However, once Netanyahu decided he was going to stay on and seek reelection, he started to see a state inquiry as a moral political danger.
What would happen if the public learned that the Shin Bet let Netanyahu's military secretary know of the dangers of October 7 at 5:15 a.m., around 75 minutes before the war started?
What would happen if the public learned that the IDF spoke to Netanyahu's intelligence officer, who then spoke to Netanyahu's military secretary, who decided not to wake the prime minister, also sometime before the war started?
Now the public knows, but it is 18 months later, and much of the public has already formed opinions for or against Netanyahu and the defense establishment about October 7.
If the public had learned all of this much earlier, as it would have from a state inquiry, Netanyahu might have faced a greater political threat to his premiership than he now faces 18 months later when much of this information is lost to the average citizen in the flood of data and cross-accusations about firing or not firing Bar.
And so Netanyahu moved from the fateful decision to avoid resigning to the fateful decision to block a state inquiry for an indefinite period of time.
Likewise, once Netanyahu decided he would stay on, he needed fall guys for October 7.
Putting the blame on Ronen Bar
In short, he needed to blame it on the IDF and the Shin Bet.
Once this became clear, Bar became a direct threat to Netanyahu, no matter what he did in any other area, and a target to be forced out as soon as possible without directly undermining the primary war effort, just as former IDF chief Halevi became a primary goal.
A related profound decision by Netanyahu was to place destroying Hamas and continuing the war as the method of doing so, as opposed to trying to root it out with a political replacement supported by the West and moderate Sunni allies, as the primary goal, above the goal of returning the hostages.
It is unclear what Netanyahu would have decided about these priorities if he had decided he was going to resign.
But once he decided he would seek reelection, he decided that he needed to portray the narrative of this war as a victory over Hamas, not as a lost war from October 7, which eventually led to getting some live hostages back, and some deceased ones.
In contrast, it was always clear that Halevi and Bar felt personally responsible for losing the hostages.
Given that they knew they were going to quit, they were always going to place returning the hostages as a higher priority than finishing off Hamas, even as the two of them contributed significantly to killing 20,000 Hamas fighters and routing its military organization in general.
All of this meant that as long as there was a way that hunting down Hamas could be combined with freeing hostages, Netanyahu and Bar could smooth over their different priorities, but once a choice needed to be made: return more hostage by ending the war or risk hostages to maintain military pressure on Hamas – they were going to enter a monumental conflict.
Bar and Netanyahu started to fight over the handling of hostage negotiations, with public leaks that the Shin Bet chief, Halevi, Mossad Director David Barnea, and former defense minister Yoav Gallant – as early as May 2024, when the defense establishment wanted a deal and Netanyahu wanted to continue the war.
They temporarily overlapped again to achieve the interim deal of January 19, but when Netanyahu replaced Bar, Barnea, and Halevi's representatives in February with Dermer and others to lead hostage negotiations, it was clear that this was because the prime minister wanted to avoid accidentally falling into a deal which might return all or almost all of the hostages in exchange for ending the war.
Bar's affidavit on Monday made it clear that this undermined any attempted negotiations to maintain phase two of the deal in general, and sidelined Egypt as a moderate mediator in particular.
Hamas has said it would send back another 8-10 live hostages for another period of one to two months of a ceasefire and return the rest of the hostages if Israel agrees to end the war, and Netanyahu has refused, saying Hamas would not really return all of the hostages.
If Bar was still running the negotiations, he could be undermining Netanyahu's narrative on this, as he or other negotiators did with leaks in spring and summer 2024.
And so, while the public remain stunned by many of the details of Bar's affidavit and the current broader fight between the premier and his Shin Bet chief, like a Greek tragedy, some kind of train-wreck style ending was probably preordained for these two titans not long after October 7 altered their fates, options, and legacies.
