“The Jewish terror leaders want to make the system lose control,” Shin Bet Director Ronen Bar wrote in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The damage to Israel is indescribable.”

Bar’s letter amounted to a thinly veiled denunciation of Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a right-wing politician and admirer of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of a political party that the United States designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997. That warning framed a Jewish community as an existential threat to the state of Israel, a message all the more extraordinary against the backdrop of a war in Gaza that Israeli officials regard as just one front in a wider conflict with Iran — and deepened a rift that threatens Netanyahu’s fragile governing coalition.

“At this moment in the West Bank, there is a concerted effort on the part of Iran to stoke unrest,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies Senior Vice President Jonathan Schanzer told the Washington Examiner. “And then you have efforts by Ben Gvir and others to intimidate the population of the West Bank and to respond to force with force but to do so in a way that is extrajudicial and obviously potentially combustible.” 

Ben Gvir spent most of his career relegated to the fringe of Israeli politics, reviled even by most right-wing Israeli politicians and voters. Yet he emerged from the 2022 Israeli elections with just enough support to play a kingmaker role in Netanyahu’s razor-thin coalition government, allowing him to acquire a Cabinet post that gave him authority over Israeli law enforcement — and his tenure has coincided with an eruption of violence in the West Bank, according to Western officials.

“The scale of this problem — it’s incomparable to what it was like [just] two, three or five years before,” a European official based in Israel told the Washington Examiner. “These violent settlers, they feel that they can do whatever they want, and there is a very limited — very limited — action against them.”

That violence has acquired added significance in the midst of the war against Hamas, as Israeli officials struggle to contain the international backlash over civilian casualties in Gaza, which they attribute to Hamas’s reliance on human shields, and try to avoid a spread of the war into the West Bank. Israeli officials have accused Iran of smuggling “dangerous weapons and large sums of money” into the West Bank, in a bid “to create a pro-Iranian Islamic terror front.” That threat derives strength from the settler violence, which risks “putting more players into the cycle of terror” and leaves “above all, a massive stain on Judaism and us all,” according to Bar.

“Some will say this activity is the implementation of the ideology of Rabbi Kahane,” Bar wrote in a pointed allusion to Ben Gvir. “It supports taking apart the state’s structure and transferring the area, to stress the choice between Judaism and democracy, two values that to my understanding only strengthen each other. In the name of this world view, they are willing to jeopardize the state’s security and its very existence, while undermining the confidence in the state’s institutions.”

The Biden administration has imposed a rolling series of sanctions on Israeli settlers involved in the attacks over the last year. Ben Gvir denounced those measures as anti-semitic — “our dear settlers … have never engaged in terrorism or hurt anyone,” he maintained in April — but the violence has crescendoed, resulting recently in a raid by dozens of Israeli settlers on a Palestinian village. 

“This was a severe terror event that included setting fire to buildings and vehicles, stone and molotov-cocktail hurling, as well as live fire, resulting in the killing of one Palestinian and the injuring of another,” the Israel Police and the Israel Securities Authority said Thursday following the arrests of five people related to the incident.

That joint statement didn’t preclude the Shin Bet chief’s scorn for their efforts, to judge from a conversation about the small number of arrests that leaked to the press on Friday.

“There’s no police in Israel,” Bar told Netanyahu in a Thursday evening meeting.

Ben Gvir, for his part, responded to Bar’s letter by demanding that Netanyahu fire the Shin Bet chief and then leaving the Cabinet meeting. “The Shin Bet chief who sent an ’emergency letter’ should have received a letter of dismissal on Oct. 8,” Ben Gvir said Friday. “The ongoing failure under Bar’s and the defense minister’s leadership must end, and it can’t happen soon enough. Yoav and Ronen, quit harassing settlers!”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised Bar. “In the face of Minister Ben Gvir’s irresponsible actions that endanger Israel’s national security and create internal division in the nation, the head of the Shin Bet and his people are carrying out their duties and warning of the grave consequences of these acts,” Gallant said.

The contretemps underscored the deep divisions within Israel almost 11 months into a war sparked by a devastating surprise attack by Hamas.

“You have an Israeli government that is at odds with itself right now — that is the simplest way to put it,” Schanzer said. “The current government has right-wing elements, within, that the Shin Bet is warning about.”