Jon Polin thanks Bar for pushing to expand negotiators’ mandate when gov’t refused
Praising fired Shin Bet chief, dad of murdered captive Hersh Goldberg-Polin says he ‘hopes true story of the failed negotiations to release the hostages will one day be revealed’
Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
The father of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin expressed his gratitude to Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar after ministers voted to fire Bar Thursday night, saying that the security chief was one of the individuals who pushed to widen the mandate of Israel’s hostage negotiating team amid pushback from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Goldberg-Polin was abducted to Gaza during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught while hiding in a bomb shelter after running from terrorists who raided the Nova rave near Kibbutz Re’im.
He and five other hostages were executed by their Hamas captors in August. Their bodies were recovered and brought back to Israel by the IDF.
“I hope the true story of the failed negotiations to release the hostages will one day be revealed,” Jon Polin wrote on Facebook.
“I continue to believe that the government never gave a sufficiently broad and serious mandate to the Israeli negotiating team.”
“Some of the Israeli negotiating team pushed hard, but unsuccessfully, for a broader mandate. Thank you Ronen Bar for being one of the ones who pushed,” he added.
Polin also praised Bar earlier this week after Netanyahu announced his intention to fire him.
“We have met many people in positions of power in the past 528 terrible days. One of those people who has shown the highest level of personal accountability, integrity, decency and humanity is Ronen Bar,” he wrote in a Monday Facebook post.
“While admitting his responsibility for the failure of October 7th and saying he will step down, Ronen has been committed to bringing home all hostages, returning the security of the State of Israel, strengthening national unity, and most recently, to establishing a national commission of inquiry that will examine everything and everyone, including himself.”
“There is a nobility in how Ronen Bar has conducted himself in these 528 black days,” Polin added.
During the cabinet meeting to fire Bar, among the reasons Netanyahu cited for dismissing the spy chief was his “soft approach” to hostage talks, which the premier charged “was not aggressive enough.”
Netanyahu also claimed that since replacing Bar on the negotiating team with another senior Shin Bet official, “the leaks have decreased dramatically, and through very successful negotiations we have managed to return the hostages.”
The currently lapsed ceasefire and hostage deal with Hamas was signed in January, weeks before Netanyahu removed Bar from the negotiating team, which has not secured the release of any additional hostages since then.
Bar meanwhile said that Netanyahu’s decision to remove him and Mossad chief David Barnea from the hostage negotiations “harmed the team and did not advance the release at all,” in a letter sent to ministers ahead of the Thursday cabinet meeting, disputing the arguments ostensibly justifying his dismissal.
Saying that he and Netanyahu worked effectively to bring about January’s hostage release deal with Hamas and a series of operational successes on Israel’s southern and northern war fronts, Bar said there was no basis for the premier’s insistence that there is no trust between them, “except if the real intention, which I apparently failed to understand, was to negotiate without reaching a deal.”
Bar also noted his support for a state commission of inquiry into October 7, which Netanyahu opposes, and the Shin Bet’s probe into the so-called “Qatargate” investigation of the prime minister’s aides.
One of the suspects, Eli Feldstein, has already been indicted for harming national security in a case involving the theft of classified IDF documents and the leaking of one of them to the German daily, Bild. Prosecutors have accused Feldstein of leaking the document in a bid to sway public opinion, which had turned against Netanyahu after the murder in captivity of Goldberg-Polin and the five other hostages — Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov and Carmel Gat.
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