Former Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) chief Carmi Gillon on Saturday night launched a scathing attack on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government.
"Israel is headed today by a bunch of pyromaniacs and is being led by an egomaniac to its final destruction," said Gillon, who spoke at a demonstration by leftists protesting against the Jewish State Law outside the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem.
“The Jewish State Law will eat the body of the entire nation like a cancer. The continuation of the radical and messianist policy on the Temple Mount will bring about a Gog and Magog war against the Jewish people," he added.
Gillon, who headed the Shin Bet at the time of the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, resigned from his position in 1996, after the Shamgar Commission, which investigated the assassination, was critical of Gillon’s conduct in the period leading up to the assassination. The Commission’s official report stated that Gillon carried responsibility for the security failures that led to the murder.
Gillon, who has been identified with the Israeli left for years, served as director-general of the Peres Center for Peace between 2000 and 2001.
He took part in the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary film “The Gatekeepers”, which features six former leaders of the Shin Bet who shed some light about its activities and the dilemmas which accompany them.
The film raised mixed reactions as critics called it "politicized and rabidly leftist," arguing the movie was a poor attempt to identify with the enemy and encouraged anti-Zionism by vilifying nationalist Jews.