National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir poses a great danger to the State of Israel, the Police Retired Commissioners' Forum wrote in a letter sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday.
The letter was signed by six former police commissioners and 42 other senior officials and was sent just as the number of Arabs killed in Israel by violent crime in 2023 surpassed 100 - almost triple the number at the same time last year.
"Ben-Gvir is not the solution, he is a part of the problem," the letter read. "The national security minister poses an immediate threat to Israel's security.
"The situation that the Israel Police has found itself in is not dictated by fate," they said in the letter. "Israel police is falling apart before our eyes and before terror organizations and criminals...Excellent officers and commanders are abandoning the police at an unprecedented rate.
"The police are a cornerstone for the existence of a democratic society," wrote the officials in their statement. "Israel cannot exist without a strong and independent police force."
The officers urged the prime minister to "take advantage of the thousands of years of accumulated experience" they have at their disposal and help "prevent the Israel Police from collapsing on itself."
The forum concluded its statement by asking to present to Netanyahu its detailed plan to combat Arab sector crime in a meeting with the forum's representatives without Ben-Gvir or Israel Police Chief Kobi Shabtai.
A continued petition to fire Ben-Gvir
On Sunday, former police chief Shlomo Aharonishki spoke with Israeli radio station 103FM to emphasize his position.
"We ask from the prime minister what we have been asking for months," he said. "First and foremost, to fire Ben-Gvir. The prime minister did not respond to the letter, and I do not think he will respond, but we felt obliged to raise the issue," the former police chief said.
Finally, he touched on the status of current Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai.
"The current commissioner, who zigzags and does not garner credibility, is also part of the problem. In reality, he is not fulfilling his role properly."
In response to these statements, the National Security Ministry put out a statement on Sunday saying:
"Aharonishki and his 'former-police' friends are proof of why we need a national security minister with a different kind of conception. Minister Ben-Gvir is fixing what [has been] failed and destroyed for years. He got NIS nine million in funding for the police, he [ran] an operation in east Jerusalem when [others] did not dare enter, he passed the law fighting against illegal weapons...he works day and night to repair from the bottom up all the damage that Aharonishki and his friends did to the police."