Shin Bet opposed personal guards for Netanyahu sons

The former head of the Shin Bet internal security service revealed Thursday that he had recommended against providing publicly funded permanent guards for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s two sons, but that his recommendation was overruled.

“If I remember correctly, I think that in my time, our opinion was that they didn’t really need protecting on a permanent basis,” Yoram Cohen told Army Radio.

He added that it was not uncommon for the service’s recommendations to be rejected.

In the past, the Prime Minister’s Office has said that security decisions regarding the Netanyahu sons were taken by the security wing within the PMO with input from the Shin Bet, and that the family itself was not involved.

Responding to the interview, the PMO disputed Cohen’s recollections, saying that he had advised security for Yair and Avner Netanyahu, both in their 20s. They are  the first children of any Israeli prime minister to have personal bodyguards, which also entitles them to a car and driver and to security when they are abroad, all paid for by the public purse.

The PMO said that after the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Cohen had warned Netanyahu about the need to increase security arrangements and even raised the possibility of transferring Yair Netanyahu to another university on the grounds that Hebrew University was not sufficiently secure.

Security guards escorted Yair Netanyahu two years ago when he and his father attended the UN General Assembly in New York, and also when he and his mother and brother visited Poland last year to trace family roots.

He has also had guards accompany him on private vacations, including one with Australian billionaire James Packer.

Noa Netanyahu, the prime minister’s daughter, does not have guards.

While Avner and Noa Netanyahu keep out of the headlines, Yair Netanyahu has attracted significant media attention for a series of controversial social media posts, some of which were criticized as being offensive and even anti-Semitic.

One post featured a cartoon with references to Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, the Illuminati and a reptilian creature. It took aim at his parents’ critics, including former prime minister Ehud Barak, lawyer and Labor Party activist Eldad Yaniv, and Menny Naftali, a former caretaker at the Prime Minister’s Residence who is at the heart of allegations of wrongdoing over which Sara Netanyahu is facing indictment.

Although Yair did not apologize for the cartoon, he later removed it from his Facebook page. His post was praised by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, which called him a “total bro” and in a banner on its homepage proclaimed itself “The World’s #1 Yair Netanyahu fansite.”

Yair sparked controversy over the summer on a number of other occasions, including for saying the “thugs” from Antifa and Black Lives Matter were more dangerous than neo-Nazis, after the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.

He also came under scrutiny for a Facebook response to a post by a left-wing organization that later filed suit against him for defamation, as well as for allegedly refusing to pick up after his dog and giving the finger to a woman who complained about it.