Netanyahu shares social media post accusing ex-Shin Bet chief Bar of appointing himself ‘de facto prime minister’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares a post on social media accusing former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar of falsifying the intelligence agency’s probe into the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led assault.

The post was originally published on X by former Likud spokesman Erez Tadmor on February 6. Netanyahu reposts it, almost word-for-word, on his X account, with attribution to Tadmor at the start.

Tadmor claims that Bar decided Netanyahu was “an illegitimate prime minister who has already dragged Israel into an unnecessary war [the 2014 Gaza war], and therefore — in order to prevent him from making another miscalculation — decided to appoint himself de facto prime minister on the night of the [October 7] massacre.”

He further claims that “after the decisions he made led to the greatest disaster in the country’s history, Bar realized that the only thing worse than the reckless decisions themselves was that they were made as part of a rebellion against the prime minister — and decided to falsify the Shin Bet investigation.”

“The top brass of the Shin Bet in particular and the top brass of the security establishment in general were infected with an anti-democratic virus,” Tadmor charges, and they acted as though they were required to “[protect the state of Israel from the prime minister.”

“After the rebellion they led ended in the most terrible disaster in the history of the state, they added sin to crime and embarked on a campaign of covering up, falsifying, and rewriting history,” Tadmor concludes.