Attorney general said set to order Ben Gvir sacked unless he stops meddling in police
Report says PM will likely be told he needs to fire far-right minister or High Court will compel him to; separate report says Ben Gvir’s wife behind 2023 ouster of Tel Aviv top cop
Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara is set to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he must fire National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir for repeatedly violating the law while in office unless he changes his mode of conduct, a report said Sunday evening.
Ben Gvir called for Baharav-Miara’s firing in reaction to the Channel 13 news report, which came amid revelations by several outlets regarding the far-right minister’s political consultations with his advisers and politically driven moves that were ostensibly purely professional.
Baharav-Miara is formulating the state’s response to a petition filed in September to the High Court of Justice demanding that Ben Gvir be removed from office for repeatedly intervening in the functioning of the police in a manner the court has forbidden.
In March 2023, the High Court ordered Ben Gvir to halt operational orders to the police on how to respond to anti-government protests, and issued an injunction against such orders in January 2024.
According to the Channel 13 report, the attorney general and the State Attorney’s Office believe that Ben Gvir has violated the law through his actions as the minister entrusted with responsibility for the police. Baharav-Miara is expected to present Netanyahu with a collection of Ben Gvir’s alleged illegal actions that may lead to his ouster, the report said.
But Baharav-Miara is reportedly seeking to “exhaust” all avenues for addressing the problem before filing her response to the court, including what would appear to be a final warning to Netanyahu that Ben Gvir must change his behavior if he is to avoid a court ruling ordering the ultranationalist national security minister be fired, a move which could put Netanyahu’s ruling coalition in danger.
The report said that while Baharav-Miara was originally meant to file the state’s response to the petitions by Sunday, she has requested a seven-day extension.
Ben Gvir said in response that the attorney general and Channel 13 news were “working together to topple the right-wing leadership,” and added that he was again calling on Netanyahu “to fire the attorney general who is working against the government.”
The report came shortly before Channel 13 aired an investigative report detailing Ben Gvir’s alleged violations of the law in his activities as minister, after a legal push by Ben Gvir to bar it from publication was rejected.
Separately, the Haaretz daily reported Sunday that Tel Aviv police chief Amichai Eshed’s ouster last year was the brainchild of Ben Gvir’s wife Ayala and chief of staff Chanamel Dorfman.
Eshed resigned from the force in July 2023 amidst widespread civil unrest, alleging that he had been removed from his post due to “political considerations” and that he was paying “a terrible cost for my choice to prevent civil war.”
The senior police official quit not long after being informed that he would be moved to lead a police internal training center, widely viewed as a demotion. The decision to transfer Eshed occurred against the backdrop of Ben Gvir’s rising anger at him for declining to use greater force against the major regular demonstrations at the time against the government’s controversial judicial overhaul plans.
Ben Gvir’s push for more aggressive policing has run afoul of the High Court of Justice, which ruled in January that he was not permitted to issue operational orders to police forces regarding how they manage demonstrations and how they use force during protests.
The idea of transferring Eshed to another position was first raised by Ayala Ben Gvir in a February 2023 group chat with the minister and various advisers, including far-right activist Bentzi Gopstein, Haaretz reported, based on messages it had obtained.
“Doesn’t the next round of appointments include him as well?” she asked as Ben Gvir and his advisers mused on the difficulty of firing a senior commander with whom he was known to be at loggerheads.
The idea was endorsed by Dorfman, who said that it would be examined in greater detail going forward, only days before the announcement of Eshed’s transfer was made public in early March that year.
Dorfman has a history of far-right settler activism that saw him slapped with restraining orders and led the Shin Bet security service to describe him in the past as a danger to society.
A sanctioned adviser
The Haaretz report on Sunday also found that the far-right minister was being advised by Gopstein, a disciple of the racist Rabbi Meir Kahane and the leader of Jewish extremist group Lehava, who has been sanctioned by the United States and the European Union.
In a separate recent report, Haaretz published internal messages that prove its previously denied report last year that Gopstein has been advising Ben Gvir on security, rather than merely political, issues. Channel 13’s investigative report also found extensive consultation by Ben Gvir with Gopstein.
Lehava is an anti-miscegenation and anti-LGBTQ group, which opposes intermarriage and the assimilation of Jews with Arabs and tries to stifle many public activities by non-Jews in Israel.
Its members have also been involved in arson attacks on churches and mixed Arab-Jewish schools, prompting then-defense minister Benny Gantz to raise the possibility of designating it a terror group in 2022.
Gopstein himself is the subject of both US and EU sanctions and was convicted of incitement to racism earlier this year over a speech in which he railed against the “cancer” of Israel’s internal “enemies.” Ben Gvir has also been convicted of incitement to violence and supporting a terror group.
According to correspondence obtained by Haaretz, following a shooting attack carried out by a resident of East Jerusalem last year, Gopstein advised Ben Gvir to engage in “targeted assassinations, confiscating weapons, blockading the neighborhood” in response.
“Start looking for some weapons, start with some weapons-sniffing dogs, everything will come up there. Send in the national guard, your national guard, give the order to send in a national guard company, I don’t know how many, to East Jerusalem,” Haaretz quoted him as telling Ben Gvir — shortly before the minister pushed the cabinet to launch an operation to collect illegal firearms in East Jerusalem.
“The time has come to understand that this is war and to implement emergency measures in Jerusalem: closures, house-to-house searches, and legislation to deport families,” Gopstein told Ben Gvir following an attack the following month — adding that the minister needed to push for a “Guardian of the Walls 2” in Jerusalem.
Operation Guardian of the Walls was an 11-day IDF operation in Gaza in 2021 that was accompanied by major Jewish-Arab violence in mixed Israeli cities, and a police crackdown on the ethnic riots.
Ben Gvir subsequently released a statement that he had “ordered police to prepare to draw up a plan for a ‘Guardian of the Walls 2’ operation in East Jerusalem,” Haaretz reported.
A bill permitting the deportation of family members of terrorists, which was co-sponsored and backed by Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, was passed by the Knesset last week.
In a video message posted to social media platform X on Sunday morning, Ben Gvir complained that “the left-wing media in Israel is persecuting me just as they persecuted [Donald] Trump in the United States” because they allegedly cannot bear his purported policy successes.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
