The High Court of Justice stopped short on Thursday of ordering Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and instead moved to tighten, formalize, and enforce the rules governing his involvement in police matters.
In a decision issued a day after the nearly 10-hour hearing, the nine-justice panel gave binding effect to the existing “principles framework” that had previously been worked out between Ben-Gvir and Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, making clear that the arrangement now has the force of a court decision, ordered the sides back into talks over more detailed procedures, and in the meantime imposed two immediate restrictions in the areas the justices appear to view as most sensitive.
In practical terms, Ben-Gvir stays in office. The court did not order Netanyahu to dismiss him, and it did not yet decide the petitions’ ultimate request. But it also did not accept the government’s argument that the case should simply be thrown out. Instead, it chose a simpler interim route: take the guardrails that were already supposed to regulate the minister’s conduct, turn them into a binding court-backed arrangement, sharpen them where needed, and keep the case alive in case those limits are breached again.
That “principles framework” is essentially the court’s way of drawing a line between policy and policing. Ben-Gvir, like any minister, is allowed to set general policy. What he is not supposed to do, according to the attorney-general’s position and the petitions now before the court, is cross into operational policing, specific investigations, protest handling, or politically tinged intervention in appointments.
Under the framework, he must consult with the attorney-general and police commissioner before setting policy on protests and free-expression issues; that policy is to be published and not altered for specific events. He is barred from involvement, directly or indirectly, in anti-government protest policing, operational decisions, or concrete investigations, and those restrictions also apply to his staff and representatives.
Thursday’s ruling matters because the justices said, in effect, that these are no longer just understandings on paper. They now carry the force of a judicial decision, and the parties may come back to court with claims that either the framework or the final procedures were violated.
Concrete changes made to law enforcement promotions
The immediate operative changes are concrete. First, promotions for senior and sensitive law-enforcement positions at the rank of superintendent and above, where the jobs have significant influence over investigations, law enforcement, freedom of expression and protest, and legal advising, may now proceed only on the recommendation of the police commissioner, with seven days’ advance notice to the attorney-general, who may state her position. Second, Ben-Gvir was ordered not to comment on police use of force against civilians, including in ongoing investigations. So while the court did not strip him of the ministry, it did cut back his room to maneuver in precisely the areas that have driven the case. The ruling made clear that those interim directives will remain in place unless and until the court decides otherwise.
Appointments were already tightly regulated under the earlier framework, but Thursday’s decision goes further by imposing stricter interim conditions on senior and sensitive posts at the rank of superintendent and above.
The procedural timeline is also short, and that is part of the story. By April 19 at 10 a.m., Baharav-Miara must file in a sealed envelope the draft procedures exchanged between her office and Ben-Gvir’s representatives, including tracked changes. Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and the attorney-general must then continue working on those drafts and file an update by May 3 stating whether they reached an agreement, and if not, what disputes remain. Put simply: the court has not finished the case. It has put the parties on a supervised track, told them to try to finish the rulebook, and signaled that it is still there if the process fails.
A major reason the case reached this point is the Rinat Saban affair, which became one of the clearest concrete anchors for the broader claim that Ben-Gvir crossed a legal line in police appointments. In that case, the Jerusalem District Court ordered that Saban be promoted and later ruled that if Ben-Gvir still failed to act within five days, the promotion would go ahead without his approval. The court also found a real concern that extraneous considerations had entered the decision-making process, after Saban, who had worked on sensitive Netanyahu-related investigations and was called to testify in Case 4000. For the attorney-general and petitioners, Saban mattered because it was not just another allegation, but an episode in which a court had already found unlawful conduct in the appointments sphere.
That is also why the justices spent so much of Wednesday’s hearing pulling the discussion away from sweeping constitutional slogans and back toward the factual record. Netanyahu’s representative, Michael Rabello, argued that the Basic Law framework does not give the court power to order a prime minister to fire a minister, while Ben-Gvir’s lawyer, David Peter, insisted the court had “no authority” and sought to reduce the case to whether any concrete criminal act had been shown. The bench repeatedly pushed back: Justice Noam Sohlberg stressed that the case was built on a series of incidents, not on an indictment. Justice Ofer Grosskopf suggested that even one improper intervention could raise a principle the court could not ignore. Justices Alex Stein and Yael Willner pressed on the problem of remedy and proof, asking how the court was supposed to bridge the gap between troubling allegations and the extraordinary step of forced dismissal.
By the end of the hearing, the court appeared to be searching for an off-ramp short of that most dramatic remedy, and Thursday’s ruling largely reflects that instinct. The attorney-general had argued that the real issue was urgent harm to police independence through repeated political interference, while also making clear that earlier, narrower efforts to restrain Ben-Gvir had not held. But rather than immediately triggering a constitutional clash over forced dismissal, the justices chose a more incremental path: they revived the old framework, made it binding, tightened it in the most sensitive areas, and left the harder final question for later if the record continues to build in the same direction. Ben-Gvir, for his part, signaled no retreat, saying after the ruling: “I will continue to make appointments according to who implements the policy, as I have until now, and if the attorney-general interferes, we will blow up the negotiations.”
The tone from the bench was sharp throughout, and not only on the legal mechanics. Supreme Court President Isaac Amit closed the hearing by stressing that nothing about the proceedings should be read as normalizing Ben-Gvir’s repeated attacks on the judiciary. He said the hearing had in some sense normalized “very harsh statements, to put it mildly,” and warned that branding judges “enemies of the nation” or the High Court “the enemy of Israel” was not ordinary criticism, but “something else.” That did not decide the legal question, but it made clear that, whatever caution the justices are showing on the remedy, they are not treating the conduct alleged in this case as routine political noise.
The result, for now, is a decision that is narrower than the petitioners wanted, but more consequential than the government sought. Ben-Gvir was not removed, but the court has made plain that appointments, investigations, protest policing, and the use of force are not areas in which he can keep operating as before while the legal fight drags on. If the parties fail to agree on procedures, or the framework is alleged to have been breached, the justices have preserved the path back to court.