Recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that there is a deep state in Israel. The term deep state refers to forces that work below the surface to control an ostensibly democratic country regardless of who wins the elections. The deep state, in its simplest sense, is comprised of a group of people who control the state apparatuses, forcing the state to act as it wishes by using mechanisms of the state such as the judicial system, control of state finances, or control of the security forces. Thus, a group of unelected people who control the critical mechanisms of the state jointly determine the direction that the state will take and in effect run a shadow state that the public is often unaware of. Is there in fact a deep state in Israel? My opinion about the nature of the deep state in Israel has changed. In the past when I was asked about the subject, I answered that I don't think that there is a group of people who sit and think about how to overthrow the government, but that there are officials who have fallen in love with power and, as a worldview, believe that they are the state and that they should determine what will happen in it. This worldview permeated the rest of the bureaucracy and so I believed that there was a deep state, but one that didn’t have organized meetings and action plans. Today, my answer is different. There IS an organized deep state, there ARE people who sit and think about how to rule the country, on which issues to fight and which not to fight. There IS an organized deep state in Israel and its members may be found in every locus of power. They do not try to hide it either. What happens if someone tries to oppose the deep state? Then “war” is declared, war which may range from personal smears thrown against the person who tries to oppose it, in other instances, opening criminal investigations against him or her, violent armed arrests and incarceration. Unfortunately, over the years there have been numerous examples of political investigations against people who the deep state did not like. A disturbing example relates to the recent arrest of senior police officers just because they did not cooperate with the Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service, which on the other hand, does immeasurable life-saving and dangerous work to protect the country from Arab terror) in its campaign to magnify the so-called phenomenon of "Jewish terrorism". Jewish terrorisms is a marginal phenomenon that the heads of the Shin Bet are interested in exaggerating so that it can justify their struggle against the Jews living in Judea and Samaria and promote their support of the “two-state solution”. One of the senior police officers who ran afoul of the Shin Bet was the head of the Judea and Samaria Police District’s investigations and intelligence department, Commander Avishai Muallem. He presented data in the Knesset that showed that the vast majority of cases that were labelled “settler violence” were nothing of the sort. The response of the Shin Bet was immediate. The Shin Bet contacted the Attorney General and asked her to order the opening of an investigation into Commander Muallem by the Department for Internal Police Investigations (DIPI), the department responsible for investigating the police abuse which is under the authority of the Attorney General. More often, the DIPI, investigates those police officers who did not cooperate with and support the ideology of the Shin Bet. The Attorney General, in turn, makes sure that the police officers are arrested, as Commander Avishai Muallem was. His home was raided and he was only released to house arrest after spending four days in prison. Similar tactics have been used for years to oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu and they serve to shed light on the Israeli deep state’s active participation with Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara against the government’s unanimous decision to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar. Baharav-Miara has a close personal relationship with Bar. Ronen Bar is probably the person most responsible for Israel’s failure to stop the Hamas rampage on Oct. 7th. (He also admitted that the Shin Bet erred in deciding on the location of the hostages, ed.) By law, the head of the Shin Bet, currently Ronen Bar, is appointed by the prime minister, serves at his pleasure and is dismissed by the prime minister. A close and trusting relationship between the two is critical to the security of Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that this trusting relationship is not there. However, hindering and deconstructing the government elected by one of the strongest majorities in the history of the state was deemed by Baharav-Miara and the deep state to be more important than dismissing Ronen Bar, and the Shin Bet has become an important component of the deep state. (If the head of the Secret Service is above the Prime Minister, we have a police state by definition, not a democracy, ed.) A number of organizations, including opposition parties, appealed to the Supreme Court to rule against the dismissal, even though it is totally clear that the government has the authority to do so according to Israeli law. The Supreme Court, scandalously but not surprisingly, did not reject the appeals out of hand but froze the dismissal until a hearing could be held on the matter. The Attorney General, in direct contradiction to the law, submitted an opinion to the Supreme Court that the government is prohibited from firing Ronen Bar, denying the government’s legal authority and the government’s concern for the security of the state. So what do we have here? An Attorney General, who is supposed to give legal advice to the government and who controls the government's legal system, has stated that the government is not allowed to function according to the law. She works together with the head of the Shin Bet who holds enormous power, and together they take steps against those who do not act according to their wishes, open investigations and arrest people in the fight to keep themselves in office and in power. These are, unfortunately, just two examples among many that demonstrate the modus operandi of the deep state in Israel, a dangerous deep state that stops at nothing, including illegal arrests, to ensure that nothing happens against its will. The deep state operates against the will and policies of the elected representatives of the people, the very definition of working to destroy democracy. At the same time, as the elected representatives legislate according to the promises and policies they campaigned and were elected for, the deep state representatives demonstrate and accuse them of destroying democracy. This is the first of a series of articles from the Legal Forum for the State of Israel about protecting Israel as a Jewish and democratic country, and on the proper functioning of the court when it is enforcing the legislated laws in support of the government, but is apparently inconsistent with the goals of the deep state.
