At High Court, petitioner acuses Netanyahu of trying to turn Shin Bet into ‘the Stasi’

Head of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, attorney Eliad Shraga, accuses the prime minister and the government of trying to turn the Shin Bet domestic security agency into “the Stasi,” the feared secret police force in Communist East Germany.

Addressing the High Court of Justice in the hearing over the government’s firing of Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, Shraga also alleges that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to install a new head of the service who would be specifically loyal to him.

Shraga also denounces the severe disturbance to proceedings at the beginning of the hearing, expressing concern for his own safety and wondering aloud if lawyers would need to bring weapons to the next hearing.

“It can’t be that the subject of an investigation can wake up one morning and fire his investigator,” says Shraga in reference to the Qatargate scandal, although it is Netanyahu’s close aides, not the prime minister himself, who are suspects in that case.

Shraga also references a declaration sent by Bar to the court ahead of the hearing in which he alleged that Netanyahu asked him to tell the Jerusalem District Court presiding over his criminal trial that security concerns prevented him from testifying regularly.

And the attorney pointed to comments by Netanyahu’s representative in court Zion Amir about what he said was Bar’s failure to tackle IDF service refusal during the judicial overhaul protests, in the months before the October 7 attacks.

“They want the Shin Bet chief to use its tools against people who ceased their voluntary service, who were protesting. Is this not the Stasi? This is what the Shin Bet needs to do, to employ invasive tools against IDF soldiers?” asked Shraga.

He also denounced the chaotic scenes earlier in the court when an uproar broke out in the courtroom forcing the judges to halt the proceedings for over an hour, describing it as “a day which will be remembered as an eternal disgrace,” and that the disruption of the proceedings was akin to “bringing an idol into the sanctuary.”

Said Shraga “This was the embodiment of a disgrace, and shameful. The fortress walls fell and were breached, an incited mob broke into the courtroom and desecrated the holy of holies of democracy in Israel.

“In 35 years in the courtroom, I have never seen a spectacle like that which has taken place here in this courtroom. A mob trying to terrorize Supreme Court justices. As lawyers, we cannot go to the bathroom in the Supreme Court, they call us traitors. Shall we come to the next trial with weapons?”

Attorney Boaz Arad representing the Movement for Integrity in Government in his presentation read off a reel of what he said were procedural violations by the government in firing Bar.

Arad said that the government had ignored instructions from the Attorney General’s Office on how to conduct the dismissal of Bar, while also failing to specifically detail what the reasons were for the government’s loss of faith in him in order to enable Bar to defend himself in a cabinet hearing.

“The failure to demonstrate one example of the lack of trust testifies to the rash behavior ahead of [Bar’s] dismissal… and reflects the anger of the prime minister towards the head of the Shin Bet that he continued investigations into his advisers and violated what he sees as the obligation of personal trust which the head of the Shin Bet owes the prime minister,” says Arad.

“The prime minister doesn’t want trust in the head of the Shin Bet but loyalty without limit.”