New bill would let next government summarily fire AG, IDF chief, other top officials

Ministers will decide on Sunday whether the coalition will support a bill allowing the government to terminate the tenure of the most senior security officials and public officers in the country within its first 100 days in office.

The bill has been submitted to the Knesset by MK Zvika Fogel of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, but it is unclear whether the Ministerial Committee for Legislation will support it.

Should it go ahead, it will be the latest in a string of moves by the coalition to concentrate power in the hands of the government at the expense of other institutions and erode the judiciary and other checks and balances.

Under the terms of the bill, a government in the first 100 days from taking office could terminate the tenure of the attorney general; the IDF chief of staff; the head of the Shin Bet; head of the Mossad; the police commissioner; the head of the Israel Prison Service; Civil Service Commissioner; and the head of the budget department in the Finance Ministry.

Any of those officeholders could be dismissed from office without cause if they had served more than two-thirds of their legally mandated time in office.

But the bill would also allow the government to dismiss such officials before they reach that period under “special circumstances,” including “substantive differences of opinion between the office holder and the government.”

Currently, special procedures are in place, requiring the government to show proper cause for firing all of those officials, and they are subject to judicial review by the court to ensure that such senior officer holders are not fired for arbitrary, political, or otherwise ulterior motives.

Discussion over the bill comes as the government is working to fire Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, while trying to appoint David Zini as the new chief of the Shin Bet.

In March, the government set in motion the process of firing the attorney general through a designated statutory committee. But in June, after it failed to convene a full quorum of that committee, it passed a cabinet resolution establishing a five-member ministerial committee to replace the old panel — a move described by Baharav-Miara as “fundamentally illegal.”

Zini was nominated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as head of the agency in May, though the appointment has been fraught from its first moment, as the ouster of Bar was itself a point of contention.

Bar stepped down from his position as the head of the Shin Bet on June 15 after Netanyahu moved to fire him from the role in a bitter dispute that ended up in the High Court.

The High Court ruled in May that Netanyahu had to recuse himself from replacing Bar due to a conflict of interest stemming from the Shin Bet probe of his top aides in the so-called Qatargate scandal.

In an interim capacity, Bar has been replaced by his former deputy, known as “Shin,” as head of the secretive security agency, until Zini or someone else is formally appointed to the post.

The debate over the Shin Bet appointments aroused huge public controversy, with opponents of the government claiming Netanyahu was trying to suppress the investigations into his advisers, while the coalition and its supporters have contended that the attorney general and the court were overstepping and trying to replace the elected government and its authority.