The response comes ahead of Wednesday’s hearing in the closely watched case over Ben-Gvir’s alleged unlawful involvement in police matters.
The petitions seeking to compel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to dismiss National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are themselves an unlawful attempt to transfer core executive authority from the elected government to the court and the attorney-general, the government and Netanyahu argued in a joint response to the High Court of Justice on Sunday.
In their filing, they asked the court to discharge the conditional order and reject the petitions, casting the case not as a routine administrative dispute but as a constitutional effort to let legal officials decide who may serve in government.
The response comes ahead of Wednesday’s hearing in the closely watched case over Ben-Gvir’s alleged unlawful involvement in police matters.
That position sharply diverges from Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara’s, who told the court last month that an absolute order should be issued instructing Netanyahu to fire Ben-Gvir, arguing that he had abused his authority in order to improperly influence police activity in sensitive operational and investigative spheres.
The High Court’s earlier conditional order was directed specifically at Netanyahu because, as the appointing authority, he had not yet personally set out his position.
In the government’s telling, however, that is precisely what makes the petitions so problematic. The filing argues that under Israel’s constitutional structure, the composition of the cabinet is entrusted to the prime minister and the Knesset’s political framework, not to judicial substitution through broad reasonableness-style review dressed up as administrative law.
It says the attorney-general’s position would collapse the line between legal advice and governing power, and would effectively allow unelected officials to remove ministers over disputed questions of policy, rhetoric, and ministerial oversight.
The response repeatedly insists that the petitioners and the attorney-general have bundled together a series of very different incidents and mislabeled them as unlawful operational interference. It argues that many of the cited episodes were public statements, demands for stricter enforcement, or discussions about general policing policy rather than direct orders in concrete operational matters.
The filing also maintains that some of the episodes did not concern police activity at all, some involved areas where the minister was entitled to set policy, and some cannot be tied to any actual police decision. On that basis, the government says the cumulative picture presented to the court is legally inflated.
Response addresses Ben-Gvir's unlawful use of police powers
Among the episodes the response addresses are Ben-Gvir’s interventions and remarks concerning anti-government demonstrations and wider protest policing; incidents tied to his public and private positions regarding the Temple Mount; statements and pressure surrounding the entry and handling of humanitarian aid convoys; and disputes touching police appointments and promotions.
The filing argues that even where Ben-Gvir spoke forcefully or intrusively, that still does not amount to the kind of concrete, unlawful commandeering of police powers that could justify judicially forcing his dismissal.
One of the most important background episodes remains the Rinat Saban affair, which the attorney-general has treated as a concrete example of improper political interference in police personnel matters. In February, the Jerusalem District Court ordered Ben-Gvir to promote Superintendent Rinat Saban, ruling that his refusal was unlawful, tainted by extraneous considerations, and harmful to police independence.
The court noted that Saban had unanimous professional backing and that her only connection to Netanyahu-related cases had been tangential and years earlier.
The government’s current response, however, pushes back against turning that and similar episodes into a constitutional trigger for removal from office. It argues that disputes over appointments, promotions, protest policy, or ministerial rhetoric cannot simply be aggregated into a legal basis for the court to reorder the cabinet.
Even if some conduct was controversial, the filing says, the remedy sought by the petitioners is extreme, disproportionate, and fundamentally inconsistent with Basic Law: The Government and the principle of democratic accountability.
At bottom, the filing asks the justices to treat the case not as one about whether Ben-Gvir has been an unusually aggressive minister, but whether that aggressiveness crosses into a justiciable constitutional ground for forcing Netanyahu to fire him.
That is the line the government says the court must refuse to cross. The attorney-general has argued the opposite: that Ben-Gvir’s conduct reflects a cumulative pattern of abuse that has already compromised police independence and therefore requires his removal. Wednesday’s hearing is expected to center on the clash between two competing readings of the minister’s role and the court’s own power to intervene in it.