21/05/2026
The Shin Bet publicly describes itself as Israel’s domestic intelligence service. But that gives no sense of its real function.
Israel is not like other western states, whose internal intelligence services typically deal with homegrown threats of organised crime and subversion (or at least what they claim to be those things).
For decades, Israel has been occupying the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem – an occupation judged in 2024 to be be an illegal system of apartheid by the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court.
But as Israel has made clear for decades now, it does not regard the territories under its occupation as Palestinian. It regards them as lands divinely willed to the Jewish people and which it has a right to actively colonise – or as Israeli officials term it, “Judaise”.
The Palestinians are simply an obstacle to the full realisation of that colonisation. They are viewed rather like an infestation of termites. They need to be removed or eradicated.
Israel is at different stages in that eradication process, reflecting the degree of pushback it has received internationally. Gaza is near completion. The West Bank is well advanced. East Jerusalem is a work in progress.
It takes brains as well as brawn to keep an ugly, dehumanising system of oppression like this running for so long and in ways that don’t embarrass allies too greatly. The Israeli army is the muscle. The Shin Bet is the brains.
The latter’s main job is to constantly surveill Palestinian society and devise ways to subvert and weaken it to prevent Palestinians from successfully resisting their gradual dispossession and eradication.
The Shin Bet oversees Israel’s extensively documented torture programme – one that relies on systematic r**e and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners, including by specially trained dogs.
Young children are routinely abused in this system: grabbed from their homes in the middle of the night, beaten by soldiers, and locked up for months or years by military courts that have a near 100 per cent conviction rate.
As part of this system, the Shin Bet uses the threat of prison, or torture, or sexual abuse, or denial of medical treatment, to pressure Palestinians into turning informer. It recruits and runs an extensive network of Palestinian collaborators it uses to undermine any attempt at organised, collective resistance.
Another major point of leverage is the Shin Bet’s control of Israel’s permit system, determining whether Palestinians are allowed to find work, travel to different areas of the Palestinian territories or access medical treatments Israel has ensured are unavailable in the Palestinian health system.
Over the past 30-month slaughter in Gaza, the Shin Bet has been doing all this, and more, on steroids. It has taken a leading role in the genocide.
You might imagine that anyone who has spent years in charge of an institution like the Shin Bet must be depraved to an unimaginable degree. A person with no conscience or moral compass. A monster without redeeming qualities.
And yet in the 2012 documentary The Gatekeepers, Israeli director Dror Moreh interviews the six former heads of the Shin Bet and they seem all too recognisably human as they critically evaluate what the agency was up to during their tenure. Each expresses varying degrees of remorse or doubt about their work – from torture to targeted assassinations.
One, Avraham Shalom, observes that Israel’s military has become “a brutal occupation force” and compares Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to N**i Germany’s occupation of Europe in the Second World War.
These, Israel’s ultimate insiders, conclude that the occupation they were reponsible for running has hollowed out the moral core of Israeli society and at that the same time undermined its security. In other words, they argue that the occupation is making Israel less safe, not more.
In many ways, their interviews prophesy the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 – and contextualise it as the inevitable outcome of Israel’s ever more barbaric treatment of the Palestinian people.
The occupation is unsustainable, they say. Which means Palestinians will keep finding ever more extreme ways to resist it.
So how did these reflective individuals fail to grasp how abhorrent and self-sabotaging these policies were when they were actually implementing them?
Why was it only much later, after they left the Shin Bet, that it became obvious to them that the occupation was wrong and that the means of its enforcement – the tools they were using – were both morally repellent and self-destructive?
Why was that insight absent while they were being paid – and honoured – to lead the Shin Bet?
In part, the question answers itself. As the writer Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
But there is far more to it than that. Each of those Shin Bet leaders operated within an institution that was much bigger than himself.
The truth is none of them ran the Shin Bet. The Shin Bet ran them.
The Shin Bet evolved as an institution to manage Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians. That was not a choice of any single individual. It was inevitable in the logic of apartheid. Any apartheid system needs a Shin Bet-like organisation at its centre.
Apartheid is a crime in international law because it requires the enforcement of systematic racism through a violent segregation of rights. As long as Israel is an apartheid state, its intelligence service will, by definition, routinely carry out inhuman acts of racist brutality.
In other words, the institutional “brain” of the Shin Bet, not any individual in it, has selected a set of policies towards Palestinians – immiserating them, terrorising them, ethnically cleansing them, torturing them and firing ammunition at them – as the necessary price of maintaining Israel’s apartheid control.
Questioning the morality or sustainability of Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians is a luxury available to Shin Bet leaders only when they are no longer tasked with the enforcement of that apartheid system.
This is a lesson about how power works that is not confined to Israel. Western states have their own versions of the Shin Bet.
Read more from my latest article here: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2026-05-20/western-leaders-charade-democracies/
