Richard Nixon’s last presidential day was hours away when he began telling his closest aides about his decision to resign.
When it came to Henry Kissinger, the president summoned him to the Lincoln Room where – according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book The Final Days (1976) – Nixon burst in tears, fell into Kissinger’s arms, knelt in prayer (and had Kissinger join him), and then cried out loud while punching the floor: “What have I done?”
None of this, as far as we know, is happening these days in Jerusalem.
Benjamin Netanyahu has not knelt in prayer, has yet to ask “What have I done?”, has not been seen crying, even when his mourning people wept day and night, and even if he will reach such a breakdown point, it won’t be in Gideon Sa’ar’s arms.
Even so, Netanyahu’s premiership, like Nixon’s presidency in 1974, is in its final days.
Evidence of this was supplied generously in this week’s rise and fall of Eli Sharvit’s nomination as the next head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), a 24-hour episode that represented Netanyahu’s final loss of touch with reality, morality, and the good of the state.
Shin Bet as a major player
THE SHIN BET, all realize, was a major player in the October 7 fiasco.
The agency, whose key task is to prevent Palestinian violence, failed to detect Hamas’s gathering attack, warn of its approach, and brace for its arrival. This failure is undisputed. “We did not create sufficient warning,” wrote the head of the Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, in a letter to the agency’s employees on October 14. “The responsibility for this is mine,” he conceded.
The 59-year-old Bar is a quintessential product of the Shin Bet, where he had served for 28 years when he took its reins in 2021. Like many of its senior commanders, he arrived there after an impressive military service – in his case, as an officer in the elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit.
En route to its top he also excelled academically, in philosophy, political science, and public administration, at Tel Aviv University and Harvard. As a young agent, he took part in multiple operations in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank.
Illustrious though this background is, the events of autumn 2023 may mean that what the Shin Bet now needs is not an insider but an outsider. Someone who would bring fresh thought and new perspectives to an organization debilitated by a monumental debacle.
Seen this way, Netanyahu’s nomination of Adm. (res) Eli Sharvit, a former commander of the navy, was promising.
Having commanded missile-boat fleets and taken part in multiple combat operations against Hezbollah and Hamas during 36 years of distinguished service, Sharvit rewrote the IDF’s naval strategy while new challenges, like the emergence of Israeli gas fields, changed the navy’s tasks.
There was also a good precedent to support the nomination – the 1995 appointment of another former navy commander, Adm. (res.) Ami Ayalon, to head the Shin Bet after its previous fiasco, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Ayalon was clueless about the Shin Bet’s work, but he learned fast and did a born leader’s fine job rehabilitating the Shin Bet from its trauma.
That’s why Sharvit’s nomination seemed like a reasonable, impartial move. That was in the morning. By dusk, the nomination had unraveled, and from its debris emerged a morally naked Netanyahu.
THE CANCELLATION of Adm. Sharvit’s candidacy was not about his abilities, personality, or record. It was about “revelations” that he had taken part in the demonstrations against the Netanyahu government’s constitutional coup.
In the eyes of the political hacks with whom Netanyahu has crowded the Knesset and government, such a show of civic activism is not only a sin but also a strategic threat.
The outcry – hollered on social media by characters like MK Tally Gotliv – should not have impressed, let alone dissuaded, Netanyahu, but it did; swiftly and colossally. And so, on Tuesday morning, the prime minister released a new announcement, fully reversing the previous morning’s statement.
Such sudden changes are bad in any managerial situation, especially appointments, which always involve people and their surroundings. But this was not the appointment of a janitor, secretary, or chauffeur, although that’s how Netanyahu treated it. Heading the Shin Bet is sensitive any time, but doubly so these days. It’s very serious stuff.
Even so, Netanyahu shot this nomination from the hip – there is no evidence he consulted anyone, including Defense Minister Israel Katz – and then canceled it with a terse communique that didn’t even bother giving us citizens a reason, much less explaining how he failed to consider in advance whatever it was that made him change his mind.
And since he offered no explanation, we must explain this ourselves: Both moves reflected nothing but panic, the panic of a sailor atop a sinking ship between gushing waves.
Like Nixon, when he fired White House counsel John Dean, Netanyahu hopes that throwing passengers to the sea will end the tempest into which he has sailed. Panic also made him besmirch police, which Netanyahu accused of treating his arrested aides “like hostages,” in utter insensitivity to what this analogy makes millions of Israelis feel these days.
Similarly, Sharvit’s appointment was designed to serve not the kingdom but the king by confusing the public, just like Bar’s dismissal was designed not to cure the Shin Bet but to obstruct its investigation of Qatar’s suspected infiltration of Netanyahu’s immediate circle.
Well, none of this will work, Bibi. Your time, like Nixon’s in his own twilight, is fast running out, your self-pity and libels are as transparent as your emotional blackmail, and your era – three decades of bravado, egomania, conceit, and flight from responsibility – is ready to end.
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.