Over a year and a half after the Oct. 7 attacks, the Israeli government is embroiled in an unprecedented institutional clash with the nation’s internal security agency, also known as Shin Bet. For the first time in the country’s 77 years, the government voted to dismiss a head of a secret service. And against the backdrop of this unprecedented move, that outgoing director, Ronen Bar — while still on duty — publicly leveled serious accusations against a sitting head of government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, acting in flagrant defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling of the dismissal as unlawful, is currently trying to get through the process his chosen nominee: a military officer with close ties to Netanyahu’s inner circle and no record in intelligence or law enforcement. This open conflict is especially striking given the Shin Bet’s central role in Israel’s war effort in Gaza — the primary front of the ongoing war.
But why would a state undermine its own security institutions, not least during a war?
Answering this question is important well beyond the Israeli case. Since the turn of the century, political leaders in Venezuela, Russia, Hungary, and Turkey — to name but a few examples — have sooner or later encroached on their secret services. We see similar patterns in the United States with the demonization of the “deep state.” Recurring patterns point to leaders politicizing and derailing intelligence organizations from their focus on national security threats, and even weaponizing them against domestic opposition; intimidating or dismissing intelligence chiefs and replacing them with loyalists; and dismantling entire units or agencies and replacing them with new bodies more closely aligned with the government’s political agenda.
To make sense of Netanyahu’s behavior, we point to the underlying logic of populist leadership. Publicly attacking the intelligence and stigmatizing it as an unelected elite that acts to subvert government policies and, by extension, the people’s general will, shores up the electoral base and helps build public support for drastic reform of relatively popular state organs. Propagating such conspiratorial narratives can be especially useful in the event of failure, allowing the government to deflect the blame onto professional authorities and evade accountability. Notably, the ultimate goal is to seize control of the intelligence apparatus and erode one more check on executive power. Indeed, intelligence organizations bear responsibility for assessing the strategic environment and national security threats and are positioned to challenge the wisdom and effectiveness of government security policies. Some are empowered with legal authorities and tools to surveil and investigate government transgression. The consequences are potentially severe: intelligence organizations may become less effective, vigilant, and resilient, democratic institutions more fragile, and the country more exposed to security risks.
Netanyahu Clashes with His Spy Chief
The recent confrontation between Netanyahu and the director of the Shin Bet centers on three immediate issues. First, who on the Israeli side bears responsibility for the Oct. 7 Hamas attack: the politicians or the spies? Such discussion on responsibility also involves diverging approaches to the meaning of “accountability” in the face of failure. Second, the struggle involves a more theoretical discussion on whether (and to which extent) the prime minister can mobilize security institutions such as the Shin Bet for personal or political purposes. Third, the confrontation involves a practical issue — whether the agency should investigate aides to the prime minister who allegedly received Qatari payments for public relations purposes.
Naturally, these controversies reflect a broader question: Is Israel’s political leadership still committed to a liberal-democratic ethos? While urgent in the Israeli context, this question also resonates with broader global concerns about the potential consequences of the populist challenge to the governance of national intelligence agencies.
Indeed, on March 20, the Israeli cabinet fired Israeli Security Agency Director Ronen Bar. Bar rejected the dismissal, and local non-governmental organizations petitioned the Supreme Court of Israel on his behalf to block it. The petition was accepted, and the court issued a temporary injunction freezing Bar’s removal from office. Depositions submitted by both Bar and Netanyahu revealed a deepening crisis and key areas of disagreement between Israel’s political and intelligence leadership. Ultimately, Bar announced on April 27 that he would step down on June 15.
The immediate spark for the confrontation was a dispute over accountability for the catastrophic failure that led to Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Netanyahu claims Bar withheld critical information in the hours before the attack. Supporters of the prime minister have gone further, spreading unfounded allegations that Bar may have even facilitated the weak Israeli response to the attack in order to politically harm Netanyahu.
Bar accepted responsibility for the intelligence failure, but he and his agency argue that broader policy decisions made by Netanyahu in prior years laid the groundwork for the disaster. These include Netanyahu’s preference to tacitly allow Hamas to remain in power in Gaza, actively facilitate Qatari financial support for the group, and allow the entrance of workers from the Strip — part of a strategy aimed at administrating the conflict by creating political costs to Hamas in case of increasing hostilities while weakening the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership in the West Bank and undermining prospects for a Palestinian state. According to the Shin Bet, they opposed this approach on several occasions and advocated for a more aggressive stance toward Hamas, which Netanyahu repeatedly rejected. Either way, Bar asserted that complaints about the Shin Bet’s failure were only raised after he refused to carry out politically motivated tasks for the prime minister.
A second source of conflict is a fundamental difference in approaches to accountability. Bar’s resignation reflects a longstanding Israeli norm that senior officials — both political and bureaucratic — admit their failures, take responsibility, and step down after major crises. Most senior defense and intelligence officials involved in the Oct. 7 failure have already resigned. Netanyahu, however, has rejected calls to follow this precedent. Unlike Prime Minister Golda Meir, who resigned in 1974 following the Yom Kippur War, Netanyahu insists that only the voters can replace him while refusing to call early elections. He also deflects efforts to investigate the failure. The Israeli government still refuses to establish a national commission of inquiry to investigate the failures at all levels: intelligence, military, and political.
Thus, instead of investigation and learning, the public receives engineered and selective leaks and a show of mudslinging. Instead of restoring confidence, public trust in the government and intelligence agencies continues to falter (while trust in the Israel Defense Forces was almost completely restored). Instead of strengthening intelligence and early warning capabilities, this weakens the intelligence services — particularly by undermining their focus, morale, and cohesion.
Thirdly, the conflict also stems from a Shin Bet investigation into several of Netanyahu’s close advisers who allegedly received payments from the Qatari government before and during their tenure. The concern is that they may have pushed for Qatari-led mediation between Israel and Hamas, replacing Egypt as the traditional broker — thus potentially endangering the strategic Israeli-Egyptian peace accord. Additionally, they are under investigation for allegedly cherry-picking sensitive intelligence information and leaking it to a German newspaper in an attempt to garner public support for Netanyahu’s stance on a hostage deal. The clash also revealed that these advisers either failed or were never subjected to the Shin Bet’s security clearance process. The prime minister argued that the investigation was concocted by the Shin Bet to prevent him from firing Bar as director.
The final — and perhaps most fundamental — dimension of this conflict concerns the proper role of professional security bureaucracies like the Shin Bet in a democratic system. In his court deposition, Bar asserted that Netanyahu “lost trust” in him after he had rejected several requests by Netanyahu to sign off on a politically motivated security assessment that would have delayed his testimony in an ongoing corruption trial. To establish a pattern, Bar revealed that even prior to Oct. 7, the prime minister made politically or personally motivated requests, most notably to surveil protest leaders and trace the sources of their funding during mass demonstrations against the government. In this context, Bar raised concerns that the prime minister was seeking to fire him in order to install a more compliant Shin Bet director — one personally loyal to Netanyahu and his closest circle rather than to the democratic system.
The Populist-Intelligence Nexus
To make sense of Netanyahu’s behavior, we should delve deeper into the underlying logic of populist leadership once in power. Attacking intelligence and security agencies can serve four goals that fit with the “people versus elites” dynamic, which is populism’s quintessence. Like many populists globally, Netanyahu presents himself as the sole legitimate voice of the “real people” against a corrupt or self-serving “establishment” — in this case, Israel’s judiciary, press, and now parts of its security apparatus. Populist governments often extend their approach to the so-called deep state in foreign policy and security through politicization, personalization, and centralization.
The first goal is to avoid blame and responsibility for negligence and failure. When faced with a clear national failure, populist leaders often survive by blaming it solely on state agencies, and by reframing crises as conspiracies against them. In case of security crises such as the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, the backlash would be against security agencies. This explains why, in Netanyahu’s current case, intelligence agencies are being recast as culprits rather than partners in national defense.
Second, the backlash against security agencies aligns with a broader strategy of polarizing the public, shoring up the electoral base, and fracturing opposition. By undermining public trust in state institutions such as security agencies, populists gradually weaken democratic norms. Netanyahu’s long-running conflict with the media, the technocracy, and the judiciary — and now the security establishment — is a textbook example. Similar patterns are evident with other populist leaders, as we mentioned earlier. In each case, national crises are used to justify personal power consolidation and institutional delegitimization. With weaker public support for these state institutions, it is also easier for populist leaders to control these institutions.
Third, populist leaders depend on projecting a particular vision of the world — one often untethered from empirical reality. This practice, which political scientists Emanuel Adler and Alena Drieschova term “truth subversion,” involves the deliberate erosion of shared standards for what counts as factual. In liberal democracies, however, intelligence agencies are institutionally bound to provide objective assessments of reality and portray as accurate an image as possible of world affairs to guide policymaking. This mandate places them at odds with populist rulers who seek to supplant inconvenient truths with politically useful narratives while establishing themselves as the sole champions of foreign and security affairs.
Finally, in democratic systems, internal security agencies often possess the authority to investigate not only threats to national security but also the conduct of elected officials and their staff. These agencies serve as a check on power, empowered to scrutinize dealings that may compromise state interests. In Israel, the Shin Bet opened an investigation into aides to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over payments made to them by Qatar.
What are the implications of these clashes between populists and their spies, at least in the Israeli case? By turning security chiefs into political rivals, Netanyahu risks undermining the very institutions tasked with defending Israel. Intelligence agencies that anticipate political consequences for their assessments — or shape their advice to protect leadership — become less professional, less trusted, and ultimately less effective.
The separation between (inter)national politics and security is also eroding. Israel’s civil-military balance has long relied on mutual respect and depoliticization – the normative pillar of mamlachtiut (non-partisan statecraft). Netanyahu’s open distrust of figures like Bar fractures that norm, fostering a dangerous dynamic where security officials either align politically or risk dismissal. Such a normative shift in numerous Western countries has also spilled over into the delegitimization of international security practices, treaties, and institutions.
The broader, long-term implications for liberal democracy could be grave. When elected leaders delegitimize apolitical institutions, public trust deteriorates, weakening the foundations of democratic governance. In Israel, this erosion has already accelerated through the attempted judicial overhaul and confrontations with civil society. The clash with the Shin Bet adds another institution — once viewed as sacrosanct — to that list. This should come as no surprise. In similar cases worldwide, populism in power over time often goes hand-in-hand with gradual authoritarianism at home and increasing revisionism abroad.
Operational effectiveness may suffer. In wartime, intelligence agencies should deliver uncomfortable truths without fear of political retaliation. If Shin Bet warnings are dismissed or sidelined for political convenience, the state’s ability to anticipate threats — from Hamas, Hizballah, or internal unrest — will be dangerously impaired, as seen in the lead-up to Oct. 7. Distraction can easily turn into destruction.
Netanyahu — like fellow populist leaders worldwide — claims to be serving the people. Yet, attacking defense establishments is far more likely to undermine the people’s security than to protect it, and the next failure could be a matter of time.
Ofek Riemer is a postdoctoral fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the coordinator of the Israeli Forum for Intelligence Studies.
Daniel F. Wajner is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations and the European Forum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the co-editor of the book Populist Foreign Policy: Regional Perspectives of Populism in the International Scene (Springer, 2023).
Ehud Eiran is an associate professor of international relations at the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa and a senior research fellow at the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence.
Image: U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons
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