The Decline and Fall of Shin Bet
Israel’s premier counterterror force has become an accomplice to West Bank settler crimes
In 1881, members of a Russian revolutionary socialist organization calling itself The People’s Will (Narodnaya Volya) assassinated Tsar Alexander II. The monarchy, aiming to divert public attention from the populist group, employed its secret police, the Okhrana, and Russia’s antisemitic press, to stir up hatred against the Jews. Incited by the slogan, “Beat the Jews and save Russia,” and later, “God is with us,” pogroms broke out across Russia.
That history comes to mind with the behavior of some Jewish settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In a cruel irony, their hatred toward Palestinians of all kinds is reminiscent of those days. The thugs, murderers, arsonists, and looters are Jews, who also believe that God is with them.
The organization that was supposed to act with full force against such Jewish terrorism is Israel’s domestic counterterrorism service, the Shin Bet, together with the army and the police. But today, as in Russia 145 years ago, the authorities have not only turned a blind eye to the violence, some have secretly encouraged it.
The Paradox
Israel defines itself as both a Jewish and democratic state, a paradox to many critics. But in the so-called Shin Bet Law of 2002, the Knesset gave the service principal responsibility for the defense of democracy, which included defending the nation against terrorism. Yet in the West Bank the Shin Bet does virtually nothing to prevent or punish terrorism carried out by hundreds of young Jewish settlers against Palestinian landowners, farmers, shopkeepers or restless teenagers. Their unrestrained behavior, of course, has shredded what remains of Israel’s image as a member of the Western world’s community of democratic states. It has also eroded the foundations of Israeli society and its once strong democratic values.
Within the Shin Bet operates a special unit known as the “Jewish Brigade,” which belongs to the counterintelligence and anti-subversion division. The unit’s role, headed by a civilian intelligence officer whose rank is equivalent to a brigadier general, is to gather intelligence, arrest suspects, and, together with the police, bring them to trial.
Originally, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the unit operated mainly against radical left-wing organizations, pursuing their activists—both Jews and Arabs—arresting them, and sometimes bringing them to trial. One such organization targeted by the Shin Bet was a socialist left-wing group called Matzpen (Compass). After the Six-Day War of 1967, which was initiated by Egypt and joined by Jordan, Syria, and other Arab states, Matzpen opposed Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. One of its Matzpen’s leaders, an Israeli Jew by the name of Haim Hanegbi, once told me—only half joking—that many members and supporters of the group, which at its peak numbered only a few hundred activists, were informers, agent provocateurs and undercover operatives planted by the Shin Bet. In that, it mirrored the FBI’s infiltration of the Communist Party USA.
Power Shift
In 1977, after nearly 30 years in power, the Israeli Labor Party lost the elections to a right-wing coalition led by Menachem Begin’s Likud, which quickly began establishing Jewish settlements across the West Bank and in Gaza. From these settlements emerged radical and militant cells and vigilante groups that took the law into their own hands on a claim that the government was not doing enough to stop the Palestine Liberation Organization’s terrorist attacks at home and abroad. The vigilantes planted bombs in the cars and houses of the PLO’s leaders, murdered innocent Palestinians, and plotted to blow up the mosques on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, all in service of building the Third (Jewish) Temple and replacing Israeli democracy with an Jewish monarchy modelled on the days of King David.
Their actions forced Shin Bet’s Jewish Brigade to shift its resources from dealing with left-wing groups (whose membership had dwindled to virtually zero with the rise of Arab terror groups) to focusing on the extremists of the right. Even then, however, the unit was small, its personnel not sufficiently skilled or professional, and the technological resources allocated to it were inadequate.
The causes were threefold: First was a general perception that the threat of Jewish terrorism was small in comparison to what was coming from the Palestinian side (especially with Iran-backed Hamas replacing the PLO as the main driver of terror). Second was the existence in Israel of two legal systems: one for Israeli citizens, including settlers, and another for Palestinians living under occupation, against whom emergency laws derived from the British Mandate are applied.
Thus, against Palestinians, the Shin Bet could use far-reaching interrogation methods, including “mild torture,” but it could not—and had no wish to—apply similar measures against Jewish suspects.
From time to time, nevertheless, the Shin Bet did succeed in exposing Jewish terror networks that murdered Arabs, burned mosques, homes and vehicles, and desecrated Palestinian cemeteries.
Today, however, the already limited capabilities of the Jewish Brigade have further declined. The unit has only about 10 case officers tasked with infiltrating violent groups, recruiting informants, and gathering intelligence.
The third reason for the decline of official interest in Jewish terrorism is that over the past 20 years, many young people from the settlements, having been indoctrinated by far right religious preaching and education by extremist rabbis, have joined the Shin Bet and military services. Most remain professionals who respect the law and the Shin Bet’s core values, but an increasing number have placed their religious and political worldviews above their loyalty to the organization and the state.
From time to time, the Shin Bet did succeed in exposing Jewish terror networks that murdered Arabs, burned mosques, homes and vehicles, and desecrated Palestinian cemeteries.
These concerns have only grown since Benjamin Netanyahu decided, about six months ago, to appoint David Zini, a retired IDF general with a history of religious extremist-flavored remarks, as head of Shin Bet. Netanyahu himself had previously refused to appoint him as his military secretary because he was “too messianic.” Some 260 former Shin Bet officers protested the appointment as “dangerous for Israel.”
Zini is a clear product of the extreme religious-nationalist and messianic right. He is the son of an extremist rabbi who immigrated from Algeria in the 1960s.
Both are bitterly opposed to Israeli courts that have allowed multiple corruption cases against Netanyahu go forward.
“May the Supreme Court explode; may it burn soon in our days,” Zini’s father said a few years ago, referring to former Supreme Court president Esther Hayut as “the president of the lower court,” along with expressing harsh criticism of the entire judicial system.
Like father, like son.
David Zini himself is a religious settler and father of 10. His wife, Naomi, intervenes in Shin Bet internal matters, most recently this past weekend during Passover observations, when she sent a letter of praise addressed to “the wives” of Shin Bet personnel, ignoring the fact that about 40 per cent of its 7,000 employees are women. She regularly promotes family values from biblical times and the Middle Ages, during which women had no role beyond raising children and maintaining the household. Zini himself refuses to shake hands with his female employees and has begun a process of excluding them from Shin Bet.
Parallax View
Meanwhile, he has decimated the agency’s once strong public affairs unit, leaving only two part-time student spokespersons to field questions or explain its policies. Unlike his predecessors, he boycotts the media, viewing it as hostile and left-wing. When I submitted a query regarding the controversial and improper appointment of his deputy, I received—on behalf of the deputy—a threat of a libel lawsuit, something unprecedented in the history of Israeli intelligence agencies.
“Zini,” a former Shin Bet division head told me, “Isolates himself and, contrary to tradition, refuses in an unprecedented manner to meet with his predecessors.”
But all these are only symptoms of deeper shifts aimed at turning the organization into a tool of Netanyahu’s ever extremist government—a politicized police force that, under National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, himself a far-right settler, has already become something like a private militia, similar to what has happened to ICE under the Trump administration.
The Shin Bet has intelligence files on hundreds of young (and not-so-young) settlers, who are rampaging through Palestinian farms, homes and shops, yet it makes little effort to rein them in. Indeed, it often protects them.
During Zini’s short tenure, one of the most important legal tools to curb settler violence was eliminated. Defense Minister Israel Katz decided, in line with the Netanyahu regime’s policies, to abolish the use of administrative detention against Jews and apply it only to Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel. He also supported legislation promoted by Ben-Gvir, and backed by Netanyahu, to impose the death penalty on Arab terrorists but not Jewish ones.
Zini himself refuses to shake hands with his female employees and has begun a process of excluding them from Shin Bet.
Zini’s support represents a dramatic shift in the organization’s position. In the past, the Shin Bet strongly opposed such a law. Over the years, it repeatedly concluded that the death penalty would not deter terrorism. As the late deputy head Yitzhak Ilan explained to me: “I see disadvantages to the death penalty that far outweigh any deterrent benefit.”
The European Union has already signaled that if such legislation is implemented, it may consider sanctions against Israel, turning it into a pariah state.
Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, another extremist settler, have a clear plan: to make Palestinian life unbearable, weaken the Palestinian Authority, take control of all the territory, and ultimately bring about ethnic cleansing and expulsion.
As a preliminary step, extremist settlers feel free to murder, abuse, kidnap Palestinians, set fire to their homes and vehicles, and steal livestock in West Bank villages without punishment.
There are strong indications that Zini shares the ideology of Jewish supremacy that has become mainstream in the Israeli government. Therefore, what settlers are doing in the West Bank is not surprising. More than half of Israel’s 10 million citizens believe the real threat to the country’s future is not external enemies like Iran, Hamas, or Hezbollah, but the possibility of a third Palestinian intifada that would lead to unprecedented bloodshed—while the Shin Bet, together with the army, shows indifference and perhaps even secretly encourages it.
SpyTalk Contributing Writer Yossi Melman is a longtime Israeli journalist specialising in security and intelligence affairs. He is also the co-author, with Dan Raviv, of Spies Against Armageddon.
An enlightening article. I was lost, now found and educating myself. There's too much blood spilling across the world.