Can judges order Netanyahu to fire Ben-Gvir? High Court weighs authority, enforcement in hearing

At the center of the case are the broader constitutional questions: When does a minister’s involvement in protests, investigations, appointments, and operational policing cross from lawful policy-setting into unlawful political intervention in police work, and when does a prime minister’s refusal to act can itself become judicially reviewable?

At one point, Rabello advanced what appeared to be a central limiting principle in Netanyahu’s position, arguing that there was no indictment in this case against Ben-Gvir.

Justice Noam Sohlberg immediately pushed back, noting that the petitions and the attorney-general were relying not on an indictment but on a series of concrete incidents, and asked how the prime minister proposed that the court should deal with such a cumulative record.

Several justices steered Rabello away from abstract claims about institutional power and back to the specific episodes cited by the petitioners and the attorney-general.

Justice Khaled Kabub said that there had been literal instances in which the minister said things that harmed the police, while Justice Ofer Grosskopf said that even one improper intervention could raise a principle the court could not ignore. Rabello answered that the minister was allowed to disagree and warned of a slippery slope in which ministers would be hauled into court over every dispute.

Ben-Gvir’s own representative, attorney David Peter, took an even more confrontational line.

Opening with the declaration, “You have no authority,” he insisted that the petitions sought an unlawful remedy and attacked the factual foundation of the case as a “smokescreen” of accumulated incidents that amount to nothing.

Peter also rejected the broader framing of the case as one of police politicization, arguing that the legal question was narrower: Either there was a criminal act or there was not.

Grosskopf pressed Peter on the theoretical point anyway, asking what the court could do if a minister were, in fact, acting to politicize the police. Peter refused the premise, underscoring the widening gap between the justices’ concern over institutional independence and the Ben-Gvir camp’s effort to reduce the inquiry to concrete illegality – if any.

The hearing turned especially tense around Kabub after the bench raised Ben-Gvir’s earlier public attack on the judge over a separate ruling.

Supreme Court President Isaac Amit asked whether a situation had effectively been normalized in which a minister says of judges that they are “on the side of the enemy.”

Kabub himself pushed back sharply, saying Ben-Gvir’s remark was not criticism of a judicial ruling but an insulting statement that purported to infer from the decision itself “which side he is on in this war.”

Peter responded by suggesting that Kabub should therefore recuse himself, but Amit rejected that notion, warning that parties cannot be allowed to force the disqualification of judges by publicly attacking them.

Representing Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, attorney Shosh Shmueli argued that the case was not really about dismissal as an abstract end in itself, but about preserving the institutional independence of the police and preventing its politicization.

She said that the attorney-general had originally tried to regulate Ben-Gvir’s conduct through legal guardrails, but that the cumulative pattern of interventions made narrower tools increasingly unworkable.

Shmueli argued that the case was not about Ben-Gvir’s views, but about repeated actions spanning promotions, investigations, protest policing, and operational matters that were meant to remain insulated from political command.

Even so, the justices pressed hard on the leap from those allegations to the drastic remedy sought.

Justice Alex Stein said he understood the argument but had difficulty connecting it to such a far-reaching form of relief. Justice Yael Willner questioned what tools the court had to resolve the extensive factual disputes in the record. Sohlberg remarked that the court often rejected broad petitions of this sort because it lacked a practical mechanism to determine every disputed claim. Justice David Mintz stressed that even if the court had authority, its use here would have to be highly exceptional on a contested factual basis.

In February, the Jerusalem District Court ordered Ben-Gvir to promote Police Supt. Rinat Saban, ruling that his refusal was unlawful, tainted by extraneous considerations, and harmful to police independence. The attorney-general and petitioners have treated that case as a rare instance in which the line they say that Ben-Gvir repeatedly approached was judicially found to have been crossed.

Shmueli also argued that approaching elections sharpened the urgency rather than diminished it, given the police’s role in securing polling stations and safeguarding the electoral process. That point cut against suggestions from some justices that proximity to elections was itself a reason for special caution.

The petitioners pressed the broadest version of the case, arguing that Ben-Gvir’s tenure reflected not merely improper involvement in police independence, but a systematic effort to delegitimize investigations and shield police officers, soldiers, and civilians who used force in operational settings from scrutiny.

They pointed to what they described as a recurring pattern of attacks on ongoing investigations, prosecutors, military investigators, and courts, and leaned heavily on the 2024 Sde Teiman and Beit Lid events as examples of the pressure they say can follow when a minister publicly campaigns against investigative action.

The petitioners also focused on Ben-Gvir’s relationship with the police command structure in 2024, while the legality and limits of the amended Police Ordinance were still under judicial review. They cited then-police chief Kobi Shabtai’s allegation that Ben-Gvir sought to impose a “policy” of not securing humanitarian aid convoys despite cabinet decisions and Netanyahu’s directives.

Peter sought to narrow that episode, arguing that the cabinet decision assigned responsibility to the military and that Ben-Gvir’s involvement began only after he saw a police unit at the scene and questioned why it was there.

A major thread running through the latter part of the hearing was the bench’s search for an off-ramp short of a definitive ruling on dismissal. Amit suggested placing before the court the earlier principles framework between Ben-Gvir and the attorney-general, along with related documentation.

Sohlberg again raised the possibility of returning the sides to negotiations and formalizing agreed limits on ministerial intervention in police work.

Willner and Justice Dafna Barak-Erez both focused on whether what was missing was not necessarily a legal theory but an enforcement mechanism.

Willner floated the possibility of a court-set mechanism to ensure compliance with future undertakings, while Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs made clear that there would be no agreement to any arrangement under which failure to comply could automatically lead to Ben-Gvir’s ouster. Shmueli, for her part, argued that such an approach was not realistic, given the parties’ history and the breakdown of trust between them.

By the close of Peter’s argument, Rabello said that, on behalf of both Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir, they were prepared to resume discussions on an agreed framework and, failing agreement, even make use of the court in that process.

For now, that leaves the case suspended between two instincts visible across the bench: a refusal to treat alleged incursions into police independence as legally irrelevant and equal hesitation about making immediate use of the most far-reaching remedy available. By the end of the hearing, the justices had made clear both that they were considering narrower forward-looking mechanisms as well as the broader constitutional question.

Amit also used the close of the hearing to stress that nothing in the day’s proceedings should be read as legitimizing Ben-Gvir’s repeated attacks on the judiciary. He said the hearing had, in some sense, normalized “very harsh statements, to put it mildly,” by the minister, but stressed there should be “no misunderstanding.” Saying of the High Court that it was “the enemy of Israel” or that judges were “enemies of the nation,” was “not criticism” but “something else,” Amit said. Those statements should not be normalized, regardless of the outcome of the hearing, which began at 10 a.m. and concluded shortly before 8 p.m. on Wednesday. The court said it would issue its decision at a later date.

The audience, though severely limited, included several coalition lawmakers, among them Likud MKs Tally Gotliv, Idit Silman, Avichai Boaron, May Golan, and Ariel Kallner, along with Otzma Yehudit MKs Yitzhak Kreuzer, Limor Son Har-Melech, Zvika Fogel, Amichai Eliyahu, and Almog Cohen, who was removed from the courtroom after shouting at Amit. Gotliv, Son Har-Melech, and Silman were later removed as well.