Shin Bet
Based on Wikipedia: Shin Bet
In April 2025, something extraordinary happened in Israeli politics. The head of the country's internal security service submitted a sworn statement to the Supreme Court accusing the sitting prime minister of trying to turn the agency into his personal political weapon. Ronen Bar, director of the Shin Bet, alleged that Benjamin Netanyahu had demanded personal loyalty from him and explicitly ordered the agency to conduct surveillance on citizens involved in anti-government protests.
This wasn't a leak to journalists. It wasn't anonymous sourcing. It was an official court document from the man responsible for protecting Israel from its internal enemies, accusing the country's leader of becoming one of those threats.
To understand why this matters, you need to understand what the Shin Bet actually is—and why its motto, "Magen v'lo Yera'eh," translates to "the unseen shield."
The Invisible Arm of the State
Israel has three major intelligence organizations, and most people outside the country have only heard of one of them. The Mossad handles foreign intelligence—the glamorous spy stuff that makes it into Hollywood films. Aman, military intelligence, supports the Israel Defense Forces. But the Shin Bet? It operates in the shadows of the homeland itself.
The agency's full name is the Israel Security Agency, but almost nobody calls it that. Israelis use "Shabak" or "Shin Bet," abbreviations that have become synonymous with a particular kind of power: the ability to see threats before they materialize, to know what's being planned in basement meetings and encrypted chat groups, to be everywhere and nowhere at once.
Unlike the American FBI, which answers to the Justice Department, or Britain's MI5, which reports through the Home Office, the Shin Bet reports directly to the prime minister. No intermediate bureaucracy. No buffer. This direct line to power makes the agency extraordinarily effective—and extraordinarily dangerous if that power is misused.
Birth During War
The Shin Bet came into existence in 1948, the same year Israel declared independence and immediately found itself at war with its Arab neighbors. In those chaotic early months, the new state needed eyes and ears everywhere. The agency started as a branch of the military, focused purely on internal security during the fighting.
Its first director was Isser Harel, a man who would become known as the father of Israeli intelligence. Harel later moved on to lead the Mossad, but he established the template for what the Shin Bet would become: small, secretive, and ruthlessly effective.
By February 1949, with the war winding down, the agency's mission expanded to include counter-espionage. Israel was surrounded by hostile nations, and the Cold War was heating up. The tiny country became a battleground for competing superpowers, each trying to plant agents in strategic positions.
The Speech That Changed the Cold War
One of the Shin Bet's most celebrated coups had nothing to do with Arabs or Palestinians. In 1956, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech to Communist Party leaders that would shake the foundations of the communist world. In it, he denounced Joseph Stalin—the man who had been worshipped as nearly divine—as a brutal tyrant responsible for mass murder.
The speech was supposed to stay secret. It didn't.
According to the traditional account, the boyfriend of a Polish communist official's secretary passed a copy to the Israeli embassy in Warsaw. A Shin Bet liaison officer got it to Tel Aviv. The Israeli government, recognizing the explosive value of what they had, shared it with the United States. Washington published it with Israeli permission, and the tremors spread throughout the communist bloc.
There's a catch, though. A 2013 study by historian Matitiahu Mayzel argues that the speech wasn't nearly as secret as the legend suggests, and that multiple sources—including Soviet intelligence agencies themselves—conveyed it to the West. The truth may be less dramatic than the spy story, but the episode established the Shin Bet's reputation for obtaining information that powerful people wanted to keep hidden.
Catching Spies in High Places
The Cold War brought a parade of spies through Israel, and some of them reached remarkably high positions before the Shin Bet caught them.
Israel Beer seemed like an Israeli patriot's patriot. A lieutenant colonel in the reserves, a respected security commentator, a personal friend of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. He moved in the highest circles of Israeli society. He was also a Soviet spy.
When the Shin Bet exposed him in 1961, the shock rippled through the establishment. Beer was tried, sentenced to ten years, and then had his sentence extended to fifteen on appeal. He died in prison, his motivations still somewhat mysterious.
A year earlier, the agency had caught another spy in an equally sensitive position. Kurt Sitte was a physics professor at the Technion, Israel's premier technical university—the kind of institution where researchers work on projects with obvious military applications. Sitte turned out to be working for Czechoslovak intelligence, which in Cold War terms meant working for Moscow.
But perhaps the strangest spy story involves Refaat Al-Gammal, an Egyptian who infiltrated Israeli society for seventeen years. That alone would make him one of the most successful penetration agents in history. Except, according to a 2004 report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he may have actually been working for Israel all along.
If the report is accurate, Al-Gammal fed Egypt false information in 1967, telling them that Israel would begin any war with ground operations. The Egyptians, believing this, left their aircraft sitting on open runways. When Israel actually struck, it began with air power. Within three hours, Egypt's air force was destroyed, and the Six-Day War was effectively decided.
The Dark Turn
The 1967 war transformed Israel—and transformed the Shin Bet's mission. Suddenly Israel controlled the West Bank and Gaza Strip, territories densely populated with Palestinians who had no desire to live under Israeli rule. Monitoring and suppressing resistance in these territories became a central part of what the agency did.
This is where the story gets uncomfortable.
In 1984, four Palestinian militants hijacked an Israeli bus, known as Bus 300 or the Kav 300 affair. Israeli forces stormed the bus. Two hijackers died in the assault. The other two were captured alive.
Then those two also died.
Shin Bet officers killed them after they were in custody, then covered it up and tried to frame a senior military officer for the deaths. When the truth emerged, it triggered a crisis that forced agency director Avraham Shalom to resign. The scandal exposed something that many had suspected but few had documented: the Shin Bet operated by its own rules, and those rules sometimes included extrajudicial killing.
The Torture Question
In 1987, responding to mounting complaints about violence during interrogations, the Israeli government established the Landau Commission to investigate the Shin Bet's methods. What the commission found was disturbing. What it recommended was arguably worse.
The commission acknowledged that the agency had been using physical coercion on prisoners and then lying about it in court. But rather than simply banning such practices, the commission established guidelines for what kinds of physical pressure were acceptable. The authorized techniques included forcing prisoners into "excruciatingly uncomfortable postures," covering their heads with filthy, foul-smelling sacks, and depriving them of sleep.
Human rights organizations called this what it was: torture, dressed up in bureaucratic language.
A 1995 report by State Comptroller Miriam Ben-Porat, kept secret until 2000, found that the Shin Bet "routinely" exceeded even these permissive guidelines. For the first time, Israel officially admitted that Palestinian detainees had been tortured during the First Intifada, the uprising that began in 1987.
In 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court heard petitions challenging specific Shin Bet techniques: violent shaking that whipped prisoners' heads back and forth, painful stress positions maintained for hours, forcing prisoners to crouch on their toes for extended periods. The court ruled that the agency had no legal authority to use such methods, even under claims of necessity. Human rights advocates called it a landmark decision.
The Shin Bet now claims to use only psychological interrogation techniques. But organizations like B'Tselem and Amnesty International continue to document allegations of physical abuse that they say amounts to torture under international law. A 2015 report noted that of 850 complaints filed against the Shin Bet for torture, not a single one had been investigated.
The Assassination They Couldn't Prevent
On November 4, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin walked out of a peace rally in Tel Aviv. He had just finished singing a song of peace with the crowd. As he headed toward his car, a young Israeli named Yigal Amir stepped forward and shot him twice.
Rabin died within the hour.
The Shin Bet is responsible for protecting senior Israeli officials. They had failed at their most fundamental mission. Making it worse: they had known about Amir beforehand. The agency had discovered his plans and sent an agent to monitor him. That agent reported back that Amir was not a threat.
Director Carmi Gillon resigned preemptively, not waiting to be fired. The subsequent Shamgar Commission found serious failures in the personal protection unit. But there was another embarrassment lurking in the background.
Avishai Raviv was an informer for the Shin Bet's Jewish Unit, which monitored extremist activity among Israeli Jews. In the period before the assassination, Raviv had behaved in ways that seemed designed to inflame radical sentiment—provocative, violent, inciting. Critics suggested he might have helped push Amir toward murder. Raviv was eventually tried on charges related to the assassination but acquitted.
The Rabin assassination revealed something that Israeli society had been reluctant to confront: the threat didn't just come from Palestinians. It could come from within.
The Targeted Killing Machine
A few months after Rabin's murder, the Shin Bet demonstrated that it remained highly capable of one thing: killing people it had decided needed to die.
Yahya Ayyash was Hamas's chief bombmaker, responsible for attacks that had killed dozens of Israelis. The Shin Bet got a small explosive device into his cell phone. When he answered a call, the phone detonated next to his head.
This kind of operation—what Israel calls "targeted killing" and what others might call assassination—became increasingly central to the Shin Bet's work during the Second Intifada, which erupted in 2000. The agency worked hand-in-hand with the Israeli Air Force, identifying targets and verifying their location before helicopter gunships fired missiles.
Shin Bet agents sit in the command center alongside Air Force officers during these operations. The agency provides intelligence about when and where a target will be vulnerable. Drones provide real-time video. The agents watch the feed to confirm that the people about to be killed are actually the intended targets.
This system killed field commanders and senior leaders of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and other militant factions. It also killed civilians who happened to be nearby, though Israel has always insisted it takes precautions to minimize such deaths.
The Security State Meets Social Media
In 2007, the Shin Bet did something utterly out of character: it launched a public recruitment campaign. After decades of operating in complete secrecy, the agency unveiled a website and bought online advertisements in Israel and abroad, specifically targeting computer programmers for its information technology division.
By 2008, they had gone further still. The agency announced it would offer a blog where four agents would discuss—anonymously—how they were recruited and what kind of work they performed. They would even answer questions from the public.
This was the Shin Bet trying to rebrand itself. The organization had long been associated with, in the words of agency officers themselves, "dark, undercover, and even violent activity." Now they wanted to be seen as a cutting-edge tech employer, the kind of place where talented programmers would want to work.
The move reflected a broader reality: modern intelligence work is increasingly about data, algorithms, and surveillance technology. The cloak-and-dagger stuff still exists, but it runs on servers and code.
Six Directors Speak
In 2012, six former heads of the Shin Bet did something that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. They sat down for a documentary film called "The Gatekeepers" and talked openly about their tenures, their decisions, and their doubts.
The film was remarkable not for what it revealed about specific operations—though there was plenty of that—but for the moral uncertainty these men expressed. These weren't soft-hearted liberals who had wandered into the security services by accident. They were hard men who had made hard decisions, who had authorized killings and interrogations and surveillance. And many of them had come to question whether any of it had actually made Israel safer.
In 2003, four former directors—Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Carmi Gillon, and Ami Ayalon—had publicly called on the Israeli government to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Coming from men who had spent their careers fighting Palestinian militants, this carried unusual weight.
The October Failure
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a massive surprise attack from Gaza, breaching the border fence and killing approximately 1,200 Israelis—the deadliest day in the country's history. Israeli intelligence, including the Shin Bet, had failed to predict it.
Within days, director Ronen Bar took public responsibility for his role in the intelligence failure. A subsequent Shin Bet report went further, suggesting that Israeli government policies may have emboldened Hamas militants to attack.
By August 2024, Bar was warning Prime Minister Netanyahu about a different threat entirely. In a letter, he wrote that Israel's existence was threatened by Jewish settler riots and attacks on Palestinian villages in the West Bank. The head of internal security was saying that some of his fellow citizens had become a national security threat.
Then came the April 2025 affidavit, in which Bar accused Netanyahu of trying to politicize the Shin Bet itself—of demanding personal loyalty and ordering surveillance of political protesters.
The Unseen Shield
The Shin Bet's motto promises protection that remains invisible. For decades, that invisibility served Israel well. The agency caught spies, disrupted terrorist plots, and protected leaders—most of the time—without the public knowing the details of how.
But invisibility has costs. Torture happens more easily when no one is watching. Extrajudicial killings face fewer constraints when they're classified. Political manipulation becomes possible when an agency operates beyond normal oversight.
The Shin Bet has been brought under greater legal scrutiny over the years. Since 1957, the Knesset—Israel's parliament—has monitored its budget. Since 2002, the Foreign and Security Committee can investigate whether the agency operates within legal boundaries. A government legal adviser approves its activities. Detainees have the theoretical right to complain.
Whether these safeguards actually constrain the agency's behavior is another question. Human rights organizations continue to document abuses. Former detainees describe experiences that sound a lot like the techniques the Supreme Court banned in 1999. And now a sitting director has alleged that the prime minister tried to turn the agency into a tool for suppressing political dissent.
The unseen shield protects, but it can also wound. The question Israel faces is whether it can maintain an effective security service while also maintaining the rule of law—whether the shield can remain unseen without becoming unaccountable.
That question has no easy answer. But with a Shin Bet director publicly accusing a prime minister of corruption and political weaponization, it's no longer a question Israel can avoid.