Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin moved on Wednesday toward removing Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara from office after two years of tensions between the government and its chief legal advisor.

The decision, which Levin announced in an 85-page document released on Wednesday, sparked outrage in the opposition and threats from key figures from 2023’s judicial reform protests that “the country will burn” if Levin goes through with it.

The primary role of the attorney general in Israel, whose Hebrew name translates to “the government’s legal advisor,” is to provide legal opinions on proposed government policies, in conjunction with each ministry’s legal advisor, and defend the policies before the Supreme Court when relevant.

Levin accused Baharav-Miara of “act[ing] as the long arm of the government’s opponents and spar[ing] no effort to block the will of the voter.” As evidence of her obstructionism, he noted that she refused to represent the government before the courts 14 times in two years, something that had only happened twice in the previous six years.

He listed the cases in which Baharav-Miara moved to block government policies, including deporting the former mufti of Jerusalem on grounds of incitement, continuing the Haredi exemption from IDF service and privatizing public broadcaster Kan, among others.

Eugene Kontorovich, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained that in Israel, the attorney general has the power to block a government policy without explaining why. “If there are two sides to an issue, the attorney general is entitled to take the side against the government without presenting both sides,” he said.

One of the attorney general’s most recent proclamations ruled out a proposal from Levin and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar for a more moderate judicial reform than Levin’s 2023 overhaul plan.

Levin has broad support in the governing coalition for dismissing the attorney general, including from Sa’ar, who appointed Baharav-Miara as Levin’s predecessor in the justice ministry and said on Wednesday that he had made a mistake.

Sa’ar wrote that the attorney general “turned into a totally political player who systematically acts against the government with a transparent goal of overturning it … For a while, there have not been reasonable working relations [between Baharav-Miara] and the government and ministers. Everything is ‘legally prohibited.’”

According to the foreign minister, Baharav-Miara “stretched the limits of the job to impossible places.”

While removing Baharav-Miara was not an explicit part of either of Levin’s judicial reform plans, it is consistent with the justice minister’s view that the government should have a more significant say in appointments to the judiciary, whose ability to overturn government decisions and laws passed by the Knesset he seeks to curb.

Israeli law allows a government to replace an attorney general in the case of “significant and ongoing differences of opinion … which create a situation that prevents effective cooperation.” 

The process may take months, beginning with Levin’s request to Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs to put his motion to dismiss Baharav-Miara on the government’s agenda, and then Fuchs and Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana must appoint members to the committee from which the government will seek advice, which is nonbinding, before appointing or firing an attorney general. A decision by the government to sack the attorney general would be the first in four decades and would likely face challenges in the High Court of Justice.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid warned that “Yariv Levin is trying to dismantle Israeli society during a war.”

Lapid argued that Levin is “one of the top people responsible for the Oct. 7 disaster and has learned nothing.” 

The current government’s opponents have argued that Levin’s original judicial reform plan created divisions in Israeli society that Israel’s enemies exploited. In contrast, the government’s supporters say that it was the protesters who behaved irresponsibly, highlighting those who said they would refuse to perform their IDF reserve duty.

Ultimately, the protesters did not act on their threats to dodge the reserve draft after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, calling into question whether the protests would be as effective at slowing down the government as they did earlier that year. 

Kontorovich argued that the hi-tech sector protest, which argued that no one will invest in Israel if its democracy is in decline, would also lose its potency because “no one is boycotting America even though [President Donald] Trump fired all the U.S. attorneys.”

At the same time, if protest leaders, many of whom pivoted to advocating to release the hostages from Gaza, could bring tens of thousands of Israelis to the streets by depicting Baharav-Miara as a symbol of Israeli democracy, they could once again have a paralyzing effect on the country. 

The Movement for Quality Government, a longstanding organization fighting government corruption that played a major role in the protests that roiled the country in 2023, threatened to do the same again.

“If a hair on the attorney-general’s head is touched, the country will burn. You’ve been warned,” the organization said in a statement.

Amir Fuchs, Guy Luria and Anat Thon-Ashkenazy of the Israel Democracy Institute, an organization that opposes both versions of Levin’s judicial reform, argued that “Levin’s detailed explanations are, in practicality, an attack on the attorney general for standing up for the rule of law and good governance.”

They also argued that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a conflict of interest because of the ongoing corruption cases against him.

Kontorovich argued in favor of the change, saying that “a huge part of undemocratic power in Israel is not in the hands of judges per se, but in the hands of the legal advisor [attorney general] as the unappealable arbitrary vetoer of any government policy.”

Baharv-Miara “claims she has the power to fire the prime minister by saying he’s too busy [standing trial] to do his job, but the democratic leader of the government doesn’t have the authority to fire her? That’s absurd,” Kontorovich added.

A poll on Israel’s Channel 12 news on Wednesday found that Israelis are split about the potential firing of Baharav-Miara, with 42% supporting it and 41% opposing, while 17% did not know. Support among respondents who voted for the coalition was at 75% while only 12% of opposition voters backed the move. 

The Midgam Institute conducted the poll on the same day Levin made his announcement, and it had a 4.4% margin of error.