From the Liveblog of
Monday, March 17, 2025
Coalition members: AG doesn’t know the law, her letter to Netanyahu ‘should be shredded’
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition insist that he has the absolute right to fire Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar over what the premier said was a breakdown of trust, and push back against Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara’s insistence yesterday that “the process [of firing him] may be tainted by illegality and conflict of interest” and that “the role of the head of the Shin Bet is not a personal trust position serving the prime minister.”
“In what normal country would you even need a special reason to dismiss the head of an intelligence organization who is personally responsible for a terrible intelligence blunder that led to the greatest disaster in the history of the State of Israel?” tweets Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. “Perhaps if Bar had guarded Gaza’s threshold instead of some imaginary political threshold, the October 7 massacre would have been avoided.”
In an interview with Radio Kol Barama, Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli declares that the attorney general’s letter to Netanyahu asserting that he cannot fire Bar without a prior legal examination “should be shredded.”
“The government has the authority to dismiss him,” he argues, also alleging that “all of the investigations against the prime minister’s associates are [meant] to deflect criticism of the Shin Bet.”
The Shin Bet is currently looking into suspicions that top aides to the prime minister had illicit ties to Qatar.
Speaking with the Ynet news site, Likud MK Moshe Saada says the law gives the prime minister the authority to fire the head of the Shin Bet and that, unlike with the dismissal of an attorney general, no reason is needed. Saada asserts that Baharav-Miara does not know the law.
Meanwhile, doubling down on his criticism of the move, Yair Golan, head of opposition party The Democrats, tweets that “the greatest existential threat to Israel is not external, it is internal, and it is Netanyahu himself.”
“He fires the head of the Shin Bet because he is afraid of what will be revealed in ‘Qatargate.’ Netanyahu knows it is either him or the democratic state of Israel,” Golan writes, pledging to “fight and prove that the democratic State of Israel is stronger than him!”
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