The Last Car

Benjamin Netanyahu lost his majority on October 27th, but not, so far, the Shin Bet. In a speech in July, David Zini explained that he had accepted the agency’s top job because he felt qualified to be “loyal to the elected leadership, no matter the opinion,” and he reached for a railroad metaphor to show what that meant. He needed to be the locomotive, he said, but in the presence of elected officials he could, in an instant, become the last car and ask where the train was going. The voters answered with sixty-seven seats for Netanyahu’s opponents and fifty-three for his coalition, and I’m fairly sure that was not what Zini had hoped to hear.

The Central Elections Committee certified the results on November 4th, despite efforts by coalition members to block their publication. Shortly afterward, the Shin Bet sent the committee a summary asserting that foreign money had reached “thousands of people and possibly more,” but it did not say which countries or which people. (In the language of intelligence, possibly more is what you call a number that doesn’t exist yet.) The police told Haaretz that they knew nothing about it, and Channel 12 reported that Justice Noam Sohlberg, the committee’s chairman, believes the case involves only a few thousand potential voters. A Knesset seat takes roughly forty thousand votes. Thousands of what, then, if all of them together don’t amount to a single seat?

There is nothing wrong with investigating foreign money in an election. The investigation already has a name, that of Ayman Odeh, the former leader of the Joint List, who is suspected of receiving hundreds of thousands of shekels from abroad and who calls the probe political persecution. That inquiry ought to be pursued to the end. But one name makes a case, and Netanyahu wants a stolen election, which requires turning one name into nineteen members of the Knesset. Failing that, keeping the suspicion alive will do, at least until the opposition is too frightened to count on the Arab lawmakers.

Channel 12 reported that Zini asked Sohlberg for permission to brief Netanyahu on the investigation after he had already briefed him, which is a curious way of asking leave. A senior law-enforcement official told the same channel that “Zini is playing for time in order to create a narrative,” and the Shin Bet denies the charge. Meanwhile, according to the Haaretz analyst Amos Harel, Likud and Netanyahu’s mouthpieces in the media turn every news item into propaganda. An agency built to hunt down people who plant bombs on buses and in cafés has now set its sights on the votes of Israel’s Arab citizens, and the Kahanist Itamar Ben-Gvir has already urged Zini to arrest the leaders of the Arab parties and interrogate them “in Shin Bet basement cells,” even without the attorney general’s approval. Interrogation basements for elected lawmakers belong, let’s face it, to a different kind of country, and the man who demands them has a seat at Netanyahu’s cabinet table.

The agency has customarily been led by veterans who learned Arabic in the field, men like Yaakov Peri, Avi Dichter, and Yoram Cohen, and Zini is the first outsider to run it since 1996. He comes from a family of rabbis of Algerian origin, studied at the ultraconservative Har Hamor yeshiva, and made his career in combat units. According to Channel 12, he used to tell fellow officers that he was against hostage deals because this was an eternal war.

Netanyahu hasn’t always cared for him, and when Sara Netanyahu recommended him for the post of military secretary, her husband turned him down as “too messianic,” according to Haaretz, an account that the Prime Minister denies. In May, 2025, he changed his mind inside the official car, during a brief conversation in which he offered Zini the Shin Bet, and he announced the choice against the advice of the attorney general, who saw a conflict of interest because the agency was investigating Netanyahu’s aides in the Qatargate affair. Messianism, apparently, had ceased to be a defect. The appointment proved its usefulness in 2026, when, according to Channel 12, Zini signed the legal opinion that his predecessor, Ronen Bar, had refused to provide, the one that cites security grounds to excuse Netanyahu from testifying at his own criminal trial.

The law leaves the loser in charge of a caretaker government until the Knesset approves another. I accept being governed by whomever the majority chooses, including someone I would never choose, but I do not accept a secret service choosing in its place. Netanyahu, his closest aides, and his accomplices in the security services and the media are plotting a final power grab, and they will do whatever it takes to undermine the election results, with tactics copied from the playbooks of regimes that interrogate their opponents in basements. If the man who said he was ready to be the last car insists on serving as the locomotive for the side that lost, the whole train will be dragged into the worst constitutional crisis in Israel’s history.