SHIN BET

Israel's General Security Service (G.S.S. or Shabak), responsible for preventing hostile activity.

The Shin Bet was created in 1948 to counter espionage, subversion, and sabotage. Its early preoccupations were Soviet-bloc espionage and monitoring Israel's Arab minority. Its first head was Isser Harel, who was succeeded by Amos Manor in 1954.

The Shin Bet expanded greatly after the 1967 war, becoming the leading civilian agency for controlling the Palestinians in the newly occupied territories, recruiting informers and collaborators and working with the Mossad to penetrate resistance groups such as al-Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The Shabak affair (1984–1986) brought unwelcome exposure of Shin Bet practices. Two Palestinians who hijacked an Israeli bus were said by the authorities to have died during the rescue. Photographs showed them leaving the bus alive, and it became clear that they had been deliberately killed by Shin Bet personnel while in custody. Israel's attorney general recommended that Avraham Shalom, head of the Shin Bet, be dismissed, but amid accusations of a cover-up, President Chaim Herzog pardoned Shalom and eleven other Shin Bet officers. A new committee investigated Shin Bet procedures, including interrogation methods that some human-rights experts said constituted torture.

The Shin Bet struggled to cope with the Palestinian uprising after 1987 and saw its effectiveness weakened when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip and large parts of the West Bank after the Oslo Accords. Its reputation was damaged by its failure to prevent the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Jew in 1995 and by the Palestinian suicide bombings that accompanied the second intifada that began in 2000.

see also harel, isser; mossad; shiloah, reuven.

Bibliography

Black, Ian, and Morris, Benny. Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services. New York: Grove Press, 1991.

Raviv, Dan, and Melman, Yossi. Every Spy a Prince. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

julie zuckerman
updated by ian black