Stay informed with free updates

Simply sign up to the Middle Eastern politics & society myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.

Israel’s domestic intelligence chief has accused Benjamin Netanyahu of demanding he be prepared to defy the country’s supreme court, as he set out a series of claims against the premier with whom he is locked in a legal battle.

In a sworn affidavit to the supreme court on Monday, Shin Bet head Ronen Bar said he had also been asked to use the powers of his spy agency to monitor anti-government protesters and to halt the premier’s ongoing corruption trial.

The document was filed ahead of further deliberations by the justices on whether Netanyahu can legally fire the spy chief. His government sacked Bar last month but the supreme court issued an injunction halting the removal until its legality was resolved.

That came amid a wider clash between the government and Israeli judicial authorities. Bar said in the affidavit that Netanyahu had demanded that in any future constitutional stand-off, “I [must] obey the prime minister and not the supreme court.”

Since that demand was made, concerns have increased that Bar’s firing could itself become the trigger for a constitutional crisis if Netanyahu’s government were to refuse to obey a supreme court ruling.

In the document, the Shin Bet leader said Netanyahu had tried to politicise the domestic intelligence service for his own personal and political ends, adding that the two men’s rift stemmed from Bar’s refusal to acquiesce.

“The origin [of my firing] was not in the professional dimension but rather . . . the expectation of personal loyalty by me to the prime minister,” Bar wrote.

Bar said he had rebuffed a push by Netanyahu to issue a security justification late last year, as Israel was involved in multiple conflicts, to enable the premier to avoid testifying in his long-running corruption trial.

He had also declined to use his agency’s powerful intelligence tools to spy on protesters against the government, he wrote in the public portion of the affidavit, which ran to dozens of pages including classified portions that were not made public.

Bar said the full document included evidence for all of his claims.

Netanyahu’s office said: “Ronen Bar’s affidavit is full of lies and reveals his failures.”

Netanyahu’s allies in government and on social media, including his son Yair, have escalated attacks on Bar in recent weeks, accusing him of treason and running a “secret police” and “private militia” they have likened to the East German Stasi.

Those attacks have formed part of a broader public assault by the government on what Netanyahu has termed the “deep state”, including attempting to pin sole blame for Hamas’s devastating October 7, 2023 attack on the security chiefs in place at the time.

Israeli legal authorities, including Shin Bet, have also been investigating top Netanyahu aides for allegedly undertaking paid lobbying work on behalf of Qatar and leaking classified documents.

In addition to Bar, the government has attempted to sack the attorney-general and refused to recognise the appointment of the supreme court’s current chief justice, while the chief of staff of the military and the defence minister have already been removed from their posts.  

Allies of Netanyahu have occasionally even raised conspiracy theories suggesting that Bar, along with other security chiefs, simply allowed the October 7 attack on southern Israel in a bid to depose the prime minister.

Bar, in his affidavit, called such allegations “lies that constitute nothing less than institutional incitement against me and [Shin Bet]”.

He said that more than an hour before Hamas’s devastating attack he had instructed that Netanyahu’s military secretary be notified of irregular intelligence signs coming from Gaza.

Netanyahu on Monday said his military aide was only notified minutes ahead of the Palestinian militants’ October 7 assault. He denied he had requested measures to postpone his trial or sought “illegal action” against anti-government protesters.

“Ronen Bar is the father of the failure [of October 7] and he must go home,” Netanyahu added.

The premier has consistently refused to express any admission of responsibility for the worst loss of life in Israeli history, and has stymied the creation of a national commission of inquiry to fully investigate the attack.

On Sunday, opposition leader Yair Lapid warned against targeting Bar, citing “levels of incitement and madness that are unprecedented”.

Lapid added: “If we don’t stop this, there will be a political assassination here. Maybe more than one. Jews will kill Jews.”

Bar had previously acknowledged responsibility for failures that allowed Hamas’s assault and had said he intended to step down before the end of his term.

In the affidavit he said that “in the near future” he would set a date for his departure, but said the court hearing was critical to ensure that his successor remained non-political, professional and law-abiding.