How to Say No to a Would-Be Autocrat

If any doubts remain that Benjamin Netanyahu aims to transform Israel into an authoritarian state, where the prime minister is above the law and dissent is presumed subversive, an eight-page affidavit submitted to the country’s supreme court this week should dispel them.

Written by Ronen Bar, the embattled former head of the Shin Bet security agency, the document is testimony from the pinnacle of Israeli power. In legalese mixed with intimations of personal pain, Bar lists Netanyahu’s attempts to turn the Shin Bet into a secret police protecting the prime minister personally rather than the nation. He also details his refusals to accede to these demands.

The message, which should be heard in other capitals where democracy is under attack, is that high officials can and must resist a self-coup—a bid by an elected leader to seize dictatorial powers.

The open clash between Netanyahu and Bar began this winter. In late February, the Shin Bet, along with the police, had begun investigating allegations that top Netanyahu aides had financial ties to the government of Qatar, which funds Hamas. Less than three weeks later, the prime minister decided to dismiss the Shin Bet chief on the grounds of “loss of trust” in him. The cabinet unanimously rubber-stamped Bar’s firing.

The prime minister appoints the head of the security service, but the post is nonpartisan—and this is the first time in Israel's history that a Shin Bet director has been fired. Opposition parties, civil-society groups, ex-generals, and other citizens filed suit, asking the supreme court to block Bar’s dismissal. The attorney general (which in Israel is an independent legal position, not a cabinet member), Gali Baharav Miara, took their side, and the cabinet hired a celebrity private attorney to argue its case.

[Read: Netanyahu’s other war]

The court told Baharav Miara and Netanyahu to submit affidavits to back up their cases. On Tuesday, minutes before the court's deadline, the attorney general’s legal team filed two statements from Bar: an eight-pager, addressed to the public as well as the court, and a longer secret one, with classified documents as supporting evidence to be seen only by the justices and Netanyahu. Netanyahu has received an extension until Sunday to file his testimony.

Whatever Bar put in the secret document, the public one was immediately explosive. Netanyahu’s “loss of trust,” Bar asserted, was rooted in “an expectation of personal loyalty on my part to the prime minister.” One trigger for dismissal, Bar wrote, was the “Qatargate” probe—which followed on an earlier investigation of the same Netanyahu aides for leaking a top-secret military-intelligence document in an alleged bid to turn Israeli public opinion against a hostage deal.

Both cases raised “most serious suspicions of grievous harm to national security.” The Qatar scandal, in particular, suggested the possibility that individuals “employed by a country supporting Hamas were to be found in the inner sanctum of Israeli decision-making,” Bar wrote. Dismissing the Shin Bet director in the midst of this investigation would send “a severely chilling message to the agency and to other investigative bodies.” This effect, Bar’s testimony implied, was one purpose of his firing.

Another, he suggested, was tied to Netanyahu's trial on corruption charges. The Shin Bet, like the U.S. Secret Service, is charged with the personal protection of top officials. “The prime minister pressured me, unusually, again and again,” Bar wrote, to provide a determination that Netanyahu had to avoid public appearances and “exposure to missile attacks,” and so could not appear in court and testify. That, Bar asserted, would “not have made it possible to conduct the trial.” Netanyahu even had a document prepared, phrased as if Bar had written it, for the agency chief to sign.

Bar refused. Netanyahu has been appearing on the witness stand.

Though Netanyahu’s decision to remove Bar is recent, Bar’s statement suggests that tensions between the two men may go back as far as two years. Shortly after the current government assumed power in 2023, Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced a “judicial reform”—in fact, a constitutional revolution to free the government from constraints on its power. The plan set off a wave of protests, in which hundreds of thousands of people filled Tel Aviv streets weekly and held smaller demonstrations outside Netanyahu’s residence and other ministers’ homes.

[Read: Why 70 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign]

Netanyahu expressed “his expectation that the Shin Bet would act” against “citizens involved in protests,” provide information about activists, and investigate who was funding the demonstrations, Bar writes. In “more than a few cases,” Netanyahu raised the subject after a meeting had concluded, and after asking his military secretary and a stenographer to leave the room. Documenting every word exchanged between the prime minister and Shin Bet director is reportedly an established practice, meant to prevent the abuse of the agency's powers.

One of the agency’s tasks, Bar notes, is preventing subversion. But according to criteria set by the supreme court, subversion must involve secretive, illegal activity with the potential for violence. “I refused to use the Shin Bet’s powers … in a manner that could violate the right of legitimate protest,” Bar wrote.

One conversation about the protests crystallizes Bar’s complaint—that Netanyahu wanted Shin Bet to be loyal to him, not to democratic norms or the rule of law, and to act against his opponents. In it, Netanyahu raised the possibility of a constitutional crisis—a situation in which the government would defy the Supreme Court.

“It was made clear to me,” Bar states, that in the case of such a crisis, “I must obey the prime minister and not the High Court.”

The details of this exchange, Bar said, are in his secret testimony. Indeed, the key problem with his public affidavit is that so much of the evidence for his allegations remains out of public view.

The Shin Bet chief’s sudden status as a hero of resistance to Netanyahu is pregnant with irony. Bar has repeatedly admitted that he shares responsibility for the intelligence failure that allowed Hamas to attack on October 7, 2023. Since then, he has also participated in top-level decision making about Israel's response, including the war in Gaza that has produced so much civilian death and suffering. And he waited until after his dismissal to speak out, which critics could see as raising questions about his motives.

Moreover, the Shin Bet would be an unlikely candidate for a democracy prize. It enjoys wide powers of surveillance. With judicial permission, it can prevent suspects in security cases from meeting with their lawyers. It plays a crucial role in preventing terror attacks—but also in maintaining the occupation of the West Bank.

Yet Bar’s professional record is precisely what makes the repetition of the word refuse in his affidavit a model for other state officials—in Israel, the United States, and other democracies under threat.

Until Bar rose to the top of the Shin Bet, publishing his name—like that of any other agency staffer—was illegal. Even in his affidavit, he seems uncomfortable putting himself at the center of the issue: “It is not with an easy heart that I have put this account before the court,” he wrote. “I have served the State of Israel for nearly 35 years … I am not accustomed to legal proceedings.”

Bar is an establishment man, the product of a hierarchical organization built on anonymity and loyalty to the state. Had he accepted Netanyahu’s claim to be the state, Israel would be closer to dictatorship. But he rejected that claim.

[Read: Netanyahu doesn’t want the truth to come out]

Six hours after Bar's document was released, Netanyahu posted a response on social media. Nearly half is devoted to shifting all blame for October 7 to Bar, absolving himself. The prime minister claims that Bar started the Qatargate investigation after he knew he’d be fired, as an effort to prevent this.

Netanyahu denies that he tried to postpone his trial, and he accuses Bar of failing to deal with incitement in 2023. He does not address the charge that he asked Bar to obey him, rather than the supreme court, in a showdown. But only on Sunday, when he files his affidavit, will it be clear which claims he is willing to make under potential penalty of perjury.

The Supreme Court could render a decision on whether Bar remains in office, and for how long, based on technical issues. But Bar explicitly asks the court to make a decision on principle—a “judicial determination of the essence of the role” of the Shin Bet director. In either case, if the justices overturn or delay Bar’s dismissal, the next question will be whether Netanyahu will obey the decision or ignite a constitutional showdown—and, in the latter case, how the public responds, and what side other government officials take.

Bar’s stand is not sufficient in itself to stop a self-coup. But in a conflict between a leader and a democratic system, he has demonstrated where the allegiance of public officials must lie.