Adv. Aharon Garber is the deputy director of the Kohelet Policy Forum’s law department. This article appeared in Hebrew in Makor Rishon.
(JNS) As part of what has been dubbed a “Gatekeepers” campaign, Israel’s Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and her team are trying to convince us that Israeli democracy itself is under threat.
According to Baharav-Miara, if anyone were to dictate to her what to do and if (Heaven forbid) Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were to determine the agenda for the heads of the civil service or the Israel Security Agency (the Shin Bet) appointed to promote government policy, our country would be irrevocably changed.
In the AG’s fantasy world, the reality in which the prime minister and the Cabinet ministers actually run the country constitutes an imminent threat. According to her political theory, the government’s attempts to implement its policy and appoint people in line with its viewpoint will collapse the country. In Baharav-Miara’s version of democracy, elections may be allowed, but their outcomes must not have any impact unless she grants her approval.
This wasn’t always the case. In the past, the government bore responsibility for its decisions, for better or worse. Legal counsel assisted the government in promoting its policies within the framework of the law. In those not-so-far-off days, there was an argument about the scope of the authority of legal advisers, but there was never an actual attempt to end an AG’s term prematurely.
Times have changed. The AG believes she enjoys absolute independence; she sees herself as independent of government decisions, and is striving to become independent of the law itself. As far as she is concerned, it no longer matters what was written into law or even what was decided in court.
She no longer assists the government but rather oversees it, which is why she insists that it is incumbent upon the state to grant her full independence to pursue her own agenda. At her own discretion, she refused to appear before the government and Knesset committees she was summoned to and saw fit to scold Justice Noam Sohlberg for not issuing an injunction against the committee tasked with examining whether or not conditions had been met for her dismissal.
In the legal opinion she circulated, she explained that since there was no way to fire her, she took it upon herself to refuse the committee’s summons, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had rejected her position and refrained from granting an injunction to prevent the committee’s convention.
There is a reason no other democracy in the world has an AG or head of an intelligence agency who thinks they must be completely independent or that no elected official should be allowed to oversee them, set them tasks or terminate their employment when they explicitly follow their own program.
The accepted, proper arrangement is, in fact, the exact opposite. In all other democracies, the counterparts of Baharav-Miara and Ronen Bar (who served as the director of the Israeli Security Agency until June 15, 2025) would never conceive of renouncing all subordination. This was also the case in Israel back when the legislature regulated the matter.
The law explicitly states that the government is authorized to end the tenure of both the AG and the ISA director. Even after the 1997 Bar-On-Hebron scandal, the government followed the Shamgar Commission’s recommendations and stipulated that in the case of a fundamental and ongoing lack of cooperation preventing a working relationship, an AG’s term in office can be prematurely ended. But our current AG cares not. She is attempting to persuade Israeli citizens that if she isn’t independent, no one else is either.
It is no coincidence that even High Court justices see Baharav-Miara’s oppositional stance as excessive. In recent years, she has lost several cases in which she refused to represent the government, and the number of times the government acts in contravention of her opinion is growing.
Just recently, Justice Alex Stein explained in a live broadcast that the prime minister may act against her opinion; her opinion on David Zini’s appointment as ISA director was rejected; and Sohlberg did not order a suspension of her impeachment process. Still, the AG steamrolls on. She might be hoping to get lucky with a sympathetic court panel, or maybe the applause from protest movement radicals has misled her.
For now, Baharav-Miara is caught in a whirlwind. The fundamental disagreements between her and the government are increasing, preventing effective cooperation and harming us all.
Thus, the condition stipulated in the Shamgar Commission and anchored in Israeli law is being fulfilled and it is precisely why the Israeli government does have the authority to force the dismissal of a sitting AG and why the government is attempting to do so for the first time in its history. The Cabinet is set to vote on dismissing Baharav-Miara in its next meeting.