Israel has a rogue leader, not a deep state

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is breaking the ceasefire and hurling accusations of a deep state coup because he feels threatened. Photo: Reuters

The term "deep state" has become as dangerous in its abuse as the genuine article ever was. Deep states are extremely rare, and where the claim is made we need to remind people ad nauseam of its true meaning.

This bogeyman was most recently invoked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides, as they try to fire the head of Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence service. Nobody's saying they can't, only that the government must follow a process aimed at ensuring such sensitive decisions aren't made for illegitimate reasons.

Deep states have existed and are pernicious. But nowadays they're being conjured to excuse leaders who, either to expand their own powers or suppress court cases — or both — want to seize control of the only institutions that can constrain them.

Announcing his decision to fire Ronen Bar on Sunday, Netanyahu said only that he had lost trust in the Shin Bet chief. Bar, who long ago said he planned to resign after the war in Gaza and certain related investigations were over, has objected. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara says the government needs to follow established Israeli law, which requires showing a legitimate factual and legal basis for the move.

Netanyahu and his backers are screaming: Deep state coup! His justice minister wants a vote of no-confidence in the attorney general. The prime minister is insisting he must have the freedom to act at a time when Israel is fighting "a war on seven fronts."  By coincidence, or more likely not given that no war is actually being fought right now, he ordered air strikes on Gaza Tuesday, shattering the ceasefire.

In a world drowning in disinformation, this is how our democracies and rights will be lost, amid cries of "deep state" and the misdirection of unscrupulous elected leaders. What's going on in Israel should not be hard to understand.

The term deep state comes from Turkey. There, the armed forces would from time to time overthrow religious-conservative governments they considered a threat to the secular state that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the republic and himself a former general, had built from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire.

While the generals and security-service operatives who made up the deep state conspired in secret, their actions were public; they conducted coups by force, or the threat of force (so-called memorandums), in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997. One prime minister, Adnan Menderes, was hanged by the junta that removed him. A cabal of intelligence agents, prosecutors and the mafia also colluded to carry out extrajudicial killings, often related to ethnic Kurds and Armenians, who again were seen as a threat to Ataturk's vision of Turkey.

But the Kemalist deep state is gone, destroyed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has put these institutions under personal control. Turkish democracy now has a different set of problems. Egypt, a nation run by military officers for many decades, with a brief Islamist interlude that ended in a coup, may have something similar. Israel doesn't have one. Nor does the US, where the claim is also increasingly common and the administration just ignored a direct court order.

Both have militaries and security agencies that may be overweening, but they have never conducted a coup and there is no risk that they are about to. What they have is institutions with legally prescribed powers that were created to insure against the emergence of absolute or arbitrary rule.

These are the referees of democracy. As in sports, you may not always agree with their decisions, but disagreement isn't evidence that they're part of some secret cabal that's working for the other side. They're doing their job.

Netanyahu and his supporters cry "deep state," because Bar has become a threat to them. In the March 4 summary of the agency's internal investigation into failures that made it possible for Hamas to succeed in its surprise Oct 7 terrorist attack, Bar fell on his own sword. But he also implicated the government.

The inquiry found that policies allowing Qatar to fund Hamas, provocative visits to the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by right-wing Israeli politicians, maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners and a perception of disunity within Israeli society (caused by Netanyahu's unpopular prewar attempt to weaken the judiciary) also contributed to the disaster. An unpublished annex to the inquiry documents the government's culpability and calls for a national inquiry, according to Israeli media reports.

There's nothing controversial in the Shin Bet findings, and opinion polls show strong support for a national inquiry. The threat comes from the clear indication that Shin Bet under Bar would provide the documentation and intelligence reports needed to hold the government to account for its role in Israel's worst security failure. Worse, the agency is separately investigating allegations of illicit ties between some of Netanyahu's aides and Qatari officials.

No Shin Bet head has ever been fired, though some have resigned. If the government wants to force Bar out, it will struggle to show any independent gatekeeper of the law that it has no conflict of interest in doing so. Hence the government's need to replace the attorney general. There is no mystery here, no deep state required.

Netanyahu tried and failed to gut the constraining powers of Israel's independent judiciary with his proposed reforms before the war in Gaza. Now he's trying again, only with an approach that's more salami slice than big bang, Amichai Cohen, who teaches law at Israel's Ono Academic College told me.

"Now it's the head of (Shin Bet), which is an independent position in Israel, and the attempt to remove the attorney general," said Cohen, who also heads the Israel Democracy Institute's program for national security and law. "But there are also changes in the way that judges are nominated and many other areas of Israeli governance. These changes are smaller and more gradual, but the end result would be the same."

This attempt poses as much of an existential threat to Israel, at least in its democratic form, as do Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran. In the name of removing a nonexistent deep state, Netanyahu threatens to eviscerate the legal checks and balances that turn elections into functioning democracies. Nobody should be bamboozled into letting him succeed.

Sketch: TBS

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg and is published by a special syndication arrangement.