After Hamas carried out its deadly pogrom Oct. 7, 2023, acrimonious divisions that have wracked Israeli politics for years heated up. It has now turned into a political civil war.
The liberal capitalist media in Israel and the U.S. present this as a crusade to stop Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who they charge is a corrupt ultrarightist who doesn’t care about the hostages Hamas holds — from imposing a dictatorship. They paint officials like Ronen Bar, head of the Israel Security Agency known as Shin Bet and a Harvard graduate, and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara as the “gatekeepers of democracy.”
A serious look at the clash over the recent decision by Netanyahu and his cabinet to fire Bar shows that what is really at stake is the defense of Israel as a refuge for Jews and preventing another Holocaust.
Netanyahu understands that if Hamas isn’t dismantled and if Tehran develops nuclear weapons, Israel could be destroyed. Therefore, Israel must take action, with or without Washington’s support. But that’s not the view of Bar and many other top Shin Bet and army brass.
Bar was one of the handful of officials centrally responsible for the treasonous course that allowed Hamas to carry out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. They made a conscious decision not to wake up Netanyahu Oct. 7 to inform him about the mounting evidence of an impending attack.
Bar submitted an affidavit to the Israel Supreme Court claiming he was fired to stop Shin Bet’s investigation into corruption by Netanyahu. But that’s just an attempt to cover up Bar’s responsibility for the devastating scope of the pogrom and to advance the liberals’ witch hunt aimed at driving Netanyahu out of office. The court, backed by Baharav-Miara, a darling of the anti-Netanyahu forces, temporarily blocked Bar’s firing.
Early in 2023 Shin Bet warned Netanyahu to stop promoting a controversial judicial reform, whose goal is to reel in the Supreme Court’s practice of reversing decisions made by the elected government. Their decisions aren’t based on law or legal precedent, but on the judge’s political biases. Shin Bet claimed that Hamas would see the sharp divisions over the reform as a weakness and attack.
In fact Hamas had been preparing the assault for years, financed, trained and armed by the reactionary regime in Tehran, long before there was any talk of judicial reform.
At 3:03 a.m. on Oct. 7 the Shin Bet “issued a warning to all relevant bodies, indicating an unusual level of alertness and the possibility of offensive intentions by Hamas,” Bar said. But “the alert level itself was flawed,” meaning no real warning was issued.
Netanyahu demolished Bar’s attempt at a cover-up by quoting the minutes of meetings attended by Bar and other documents leading up to, on and after Oct. 7. Bar issued a 5:15 a.m. “update,” Netanyahu noted, saying any actions to confront Hamas should be held to “medium, secret readiness in order not to create a miscalculation.”
“If Bar would have called on the IDF to prepare at high readiness and not ‘medium, secret,’ to send all ground and air forces to the Gaza border region, and if he would have determined not to ‘avoid broad actions,’ but rather the opposite, instructed the IDF to initiate it immediately,” Netanyahu said, “the massacre would have been avoided.”
After Netanyahu made that exchange public, Bar announced that he was resigning, effective June 15.
U.S. rulers protect their interests
Israel is class-divided, like all capitalist countries, with a large meritocratic middle-class layer that wants Netanyahu out at all costs. But there is something deeper involved here.
The capitalist rulers of Israel, including Netanyahu, have sought to rely on the backing of U.S. imperialism to defend Israel’s existence. But the billions of dollars of U.S. military “aid” and decades of intimate collaboration between Shin Bet officials and U.S. and British spy chiefs have led to common assumptions and perspectives. They are convinced the best course is not to rattle Hamas or it will lash out.
But what the U.S. rulers want is based entirely on their own national interests, including stability for their influence and investments in the Middle East. Israel and the Jews, for them, are expendable.
That’s why Netanyahu intends to replace Bar with a leader he can trust.
But the fight isn’t over. Even with Bar’s resignation, he and the attorney general are demanding the Supreme Court rule that the country’s elected leadership, that’s Netanyahu today, does not have the power to remove the spy agency’s leaders.