In his first interview since entering politics he waved ambition away: I am not entering to be prime minister, I have come to help, to push the wagon. No ministry request from him is on record.
Who they are
Yoram Cohen spent his career in the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, and rose to head it as its twelfth director. He was born in 1960 to Leah and Moshe Cohen, who had come to Israel from Afghanistan nine years earlier and spoke Afghan at home. He grew up in the Shapira neighbourhood of south Tel Aviv, went to the Bilu religious school there and to the Midrashiyat Noam yeshiva high school in Pardes Hanna, and enlisted in 1979, choosing Golani and joining Sayeret Golani.
Cohen joined the Shin Bet in 1982 as a bodyguard for field coordinators and moved up through the field ranks: coordinator in the Binyamin district, then in Ramallah, head of the operational desk in Judea, head of the counterterrorism division for Jerusalem and Judea, and head of the Arab-Iranian counterterrorism department. He took charge of the Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria region in 2003 and became deputy to director Yuval Diskin two years later, then spent two years as a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writing on Hamas and the armed groups around it in Gaza.
He was among the commanders of the strike that killed Ahmed Jabari in November 2012. He read political science at the University of Haifa and is a graduate of the National Security College.
Positions and record
Security: Professional counterterrorism over political theater.
Police: Rebuild the police as a professional force.
Rule of law: Security services answer to law, not politics.
Political pressure: In a December 2024 affidavit to the High Court, said Netanyahu asked him, while he was Shin Bet director, to use the agency's surveillance powers for personal political ends and to strip Naftali Bennett's security clearance, requests he says he refused.
Shalit deal: As Shin Bet director, backed the October 2011 Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, which released Yahya Sinwar, later Hamas's Gaza leader and an architect of the October 7 attack; Cohen called the risk manageable at the time and has continued to defend the decision.
Where they stand
Holds the party line on every issue.