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In 2025, Ofek Riemer, Daniel Wajner, and Ehud Eiran wrote, “Populists vs. Spies in Israel and Beyond,” where they argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s relationship with Israel’s intelligence agencies could have grave consequences for Israel’s democracy. A year later, we asked them to revisit their arguments.
Image: U.S. Department of State via Wikimedia Commons
In your 2025 article, you argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s clashes with Israel’s internal intelligence agency, Shin Bet, is a hallmark tactic of populist leaders and could have grave long-term consequences for Israel’s liberal democracy. A year later, what is the dynamic like between Netanyahu and the intelligence community? Is the relationship better or more strained than before?
Compared to a year ago, relations between Netanyahu and the leadership of Israel’s intelligence agencies are less openly confrontational. This apparent improvement, however, reflects a shift in the balance of power rather than a resolution of underlying tensions. In our 2025 article, we argued that populist leaders often move from blaming intelligence agencies for policy failures to delegitimizing them publicly and eventually to seeking greater political control over them. Over the past year, that dynamic has become particularly pronounced in Israel.
A few months after the legal battle we described in last year’s article, Maj. Gen. (ret.) David Zini was appointed head of the Shin Bet, and relations between him and the prime minister have appeared smooth and cooperative. Under his leadership, the Shin Bet has provided several assessments that appear aligned with Netanyahu’s political and personal interests. For example, the agency submitted an assessment to the court that contributed to the postponement of Netanyahu’s testimony in his corruption trial citing security risks and another that reversed the agency’s traditional position, supporting the populist death penalty law for terrorists proposed by the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, and approved in March 2026.
At the same time, the pattern has expanded beyond the Shin Bet. As Israel’s strategic focus shifted from Gaza and Lebanon to Iran, attention increasingly turned to the Mossad and its leadership. Director David Barnea, once regarded as a close ally and indispensable partner who publicly supported Netanyahu’s policy toward Iran, became a convenient scapegoat once the ambitious objectives of the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran — chief among them being regime change — proved unattainable. Earlier this month, Barnea was succeeded by Roman Gofman, Netanyahu’s military aide and a hawkish Israeli Defense Forces officer with no prior significant experience in intelligence. Government-aligned media outlets defended the appointment as necessary to reform the Mossad in the wake of its alleged shortcomings in Iran.
From Netanyahu’s perspective, relations with the intelligence community are, therefore, more accommodating than before. From the perspective of democratic governance, however, the more intelligence becomes politically aligned with the government of the day, the greater the risk for national security, the rule of law, and the democratic system.
You warned in your article that operational effectiveness may suffer from a demoralized intelligence community. Have there been any indicators that Israel’s national security has experienced heightened vulnerabilities due to issues between intelligence and the executive government?
Two developments raise questions about the effectiveness of intelligence under increasingly populist conditions in Israel: the campaign against Iran and the state’s response to Israeli extremist violence in the West Bank.
The first concerns the striking absence of visible intelligence dissent regarding the war with Iran. Unlike in the United States, Israeli intelligence assessments are rarely released publicly. Nevertheless, the Israeli public is normally exposed to at least indirect indications of intelligence thinking through background briefings and leaks to the media. Over the past year, however, the public has heard remarkably little from the intelligence community. Following official declarations of “a historic victory ” in Iran and “complete and total obliteration” of its nuclear program in June 2025, no competing intelligence assessments entered the public sphere. Nor, in the run-up to the military campaign launched in February 2026, were there visible debates regarding the feasibility of the war’s objectives or the likelihood of achieving them. Similarly, following the campaign, the public was not exposed to intelligence assessments regarding its military and political outcomes. Whether this reflects genuine consensus, self-censorship, or the marginalization of dissenting voices is difficult to know. Yet each of these possibilities is consistent with the tendencies toward personalization, centralization, and politicization that characterize populist leaderships, and raises concerns about the current autonomy of intelligence agencies and their influence on decision-making.
The second concerns violence by Israeli extremists in the West Bank. Here, the issue appears less related to intelligence effectiveness than to political priorities. Reports suggest that the problem is not a lack of intelligence capabilities, but a reduced willingness to treat the issue as a national security challenge that deserves top priority. When political and intelligence leaders signal that certain threats are less important, resources, attention, and organizational incentives tend to follow. Over time, this seemingly erodes morale and effectiveness among the personnel tasked with addressing those threats.
You describe the concept of mamlachtiut — Israel’s tradition of non-partisan statecraft — as a normative pillar of its civil-military balance. How badly has that norm been damaged, and is there a realistic path to restoring it?
We will answer this question with a story.
On the eve of Passover, Naomi Zini, the wife of the newly appointed Shin Bet director, sent a letter addressed to “the wives of the organization’s personnel.” The letter was unprecedented: a relative of the head of a secret service communicating directly with employees through organizational channels. More strikingly, it overlooked the many women who serve in the Shin Bet and instead praised wives for supporting their husbands’ service by caring for the home and family. In doing so, it reflected a traditional religious worldview and touched directly on one of the most contentious issues in Israeli public life: the role of women in the security establishment and the broader debate over equality in military and national service.
By itself, this is a minor incident. Yet it captures a broader shift. Mamlachtiut is not simply political neutrality. It is the idea that state institutions should serve the state as a whole rather than particular ideological, religious, or partisan constituencies, and that those serving within them should, when necessary, subordinate aspects of their personal identities to a shared public mission. What made Israel’s intelligence services distinctive was their commitment to this professional, state-centered ethos.
Today, that ethos appears increasingly contested. The controversy surrounding the Zini letter sits alongside more consequential developments, including efforts to weaken internal legal oversight, the growing politicization of senior appointments, and a diminished sense of urgency regarding Israeli extremist violence. Taken together, these trends suggest not merely a change in leadership, but a struggle over the identity and values of the intelligence community itself.
Whether mamlachtiut can be restored will depend less on personalities than on rebuilding institutional norms that reward professional independence, political neutrality, and loyalty to the state rather than to any particular government.
Finally, with the benefit of hindsight, what would you change about your original argument?
We initially presented the populist pattern as more of a linear progression: from sidelining intelligence, to delegitimizing it, to ultimately seeking political control over intelligence organizations. The past year has made it clearer for us that this process may be better understood as cyclical rather than linear.
Populist executives often discount expert advice in favor of loyalists, partisan ideologues, and their own intuition. This increases the likelihood of policy failures and strategic surprises. When such setbacks occur, intelligence and security agencies become convenient targets for blame, allowing political leaders to deflect responsibility and further undermine the agencies’ public credibility. In turn, this delegitimization creates additional opportunities to tighten political control through organizational “reforms” and patronage.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: Weakened intelligence institutions become less capable of providing independent and effective assessments, increasing the risk of future failures, which can then be used to justify further political intervention. Rather than a one-way progression from neglect to capture, populist intelligence-policy relations may therefore operate as a feedback loop in which policy failure, blame-shifting, politicization, and institutional hollowing reinforce one another over time.
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Ofek Riemer is an assistant professor at the Ben-Gurion Institute for the Study of Israel and Zionism at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is the founder and former coordinator of the Israeli Forum for Intelligence Studies.
Ehud Eiran is the chair of the Department of International Relations at the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa and a senior research fellow at the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence.
Daniel F. Wajner is an assistant professor in the Department of International Relations and the European Forum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the co-editor of the book Populist Foreign Policy: Regional Perspectives of Populism in the International Scene (Springer, 2023).
Image: DHSgov via Wikimedia Commons
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