The question of whether Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar opened a criminal probe into National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and portions of the police regarding a “Kahanist takeover” is wrapped in a mix of truth, exaggeration, and a gray fog.
The truth is that on June 19, 2024, Bar met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him that he believed that Ben-Gvir and some of his top aides and appointees were undermining aspects of national security in terms of obstructing, arresting and investigating violent Jewish extremists.
Further, the truth is that long before that point, Shin Bet officials were noticing what they viewed as irregularities in how the police were handling such Jewish extremist cases when the alleged violence was against Palestinians.
They were not the only ones.
Accusations against Ben Gvir
In the summer of 2024, as he left office, IDF Central Command Yehuda Fuchs publicly accused the police, under Ben-Gvir, of failing to go after violent Jewish extremists.
In fact, Fuchs had told Netanyahu this directly at a meeting in May 2024, weeks after Jewish extremists allegedly killed some West Bank Palestinians, with no claim of self-defense. At that same meeting, Fuchs pressured the police to explain a sloppy investigation into the incident.
All of this came after the police did little to probe a massive Jewish extremist attack on Palestinian civilians in Huwara in February 2023.
In December 2024, the Police Investigations Department publicized that it was probing certain senior West Bank Police officials and Israel Prisons Service officials for obstructing investigations of Jewish extremists at the direct or indirect behest of Ben Gvir. This case is ongoing and developing and is likely to lead to one or more indictments.
So when Bar came to Netanyahu on June 19, 2024, the issue was not remotely new to Netanyahu.
What was decided at this meeting is in a gray zone.
According to the Shin Bet, Netanyahu gave it permission to look into the issue.
According to Netanyahu, he gave the Shin Bet permission to bring evidence before him and Ben Gvir.
This is the background to the document which Channel 12 produced on Sunday night in which Bar writes to certain Shin Bet officials that they should be careful about their dealings with certain police officials and should start collecting information about irregularities.
Why then did the Shin Bet unambiguously deny that it was or had probed the police and Ben-Gvir for being part of a Kahanist conspiracy?
The Jerusalem Post understands that the Shin Bet’s position is that this was nor a formal criminal probe.
Rather, this was some kind of informal information gathering process regarding irregular conduct in dealing with Jewish extremist cases.
The goal of the gathering of the information is the problem.
It is unclear the Shin Bet knew what it would do with that information.
Was it going to present it to the prime minister? To Ben-Gvir? Under what circumstances?
If there was no formal goal, this is where critics of Bar can argue that he might have wanted to hold onto the information for nefarious extortion purposes.
Also, after all of the talk of Jewish extremist violence, Ben-Gvir claims that most of the Jewish-Israelis who tend to get detained for such violence are innocent with no evidence against them or that they have self-defense justifications.
He claims that he had the right as a matter of policy to discourage the police from probing people too aggressively who might be innocent.
This is how Ben-Gvir then says that Bar was playing politics with a clandestine organization and veering off from national security concerns.
There are documented cases where the Shin Bet or police detained and aggressively interrogated an innocent Jewish-Israel and later released them realizing their error.
But there are far more cases where the police, especially in the Ben-Gvir era, failed utterly to catch suspects who perpetrated unprovoked violence against Palestinian civilians as revenge attacks for terror committed by other Palestinians who were terrorists.
If you are a Shin Bet official trying to crack these cases and you watch your police counterparts botch lead after lead that you send them regarding Jewish violence, while the same police force takes Palestinian violence seriously, it would not be surprising that you would eventually want to address this as a systematic problem, and not a one-off error.
Other Shin Bet investigations
Presumably, some of the Shin Bet’s work led to the ongoing prosecution against some senior police officials.
But this broader amorphous review of the police by the Shin Bet does expose it to allegations of dangerous abuse of power.
Curiously, there has been no talk of where Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara may have played any role in this story.
If she did not, then if Bar and his associates collected any information that went beyond irregular conduct in handling Jewish extremist cases, they would very much have been operating in a black hole outside the legal paradigm.
On the other hand, Bar can say he had permission from Netanyahu and that Baharav-Miara was involved in at least portions of this informal probe of Kahanists within the police.
It will be important to hear further clarifications from Bar about what he did and why he did it to conclude whether he stayed within the law under highly challenging circumstances, straddled the law, or bulldozed through the limits of his office.
