National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has appealed a Jerusalem District Court ruling that ordered him to approve the promotion of police officer Rinat Saban, escalating a long-running dispute that has come to center not only on one officer’s rank but on the limits of ministerial power over the police and the independence of investigators who handle politically sensitive cases.
The appeal, filed after the expiration of a court-imposed deadline, seeks to overturn both the district court’s February 9 judgment ordering Saban’s promotion to chief superintendent and a March 18 clarification stating that if Ben-Gvir did not sign by March 23, her promotion would take effect by force of the judicial ruling itself and retroactively from April 28, 2025.
In the filing, Ben-Gvir argues that the court acted without authority when it effectively bypassed the minister’s signature and transformed a judicial ruling into the operative act of promotion.
The latest move follows months of litigation over Saban’s stalled advancement. Judge David Gidoni ruled in February that Ben-Gvir’s continued refusal to approve the promotion was “extremely unreasonable” and raised a “real and substantial concern” that extraneous considerations were at work.
In subsequent proceedings, the court also rejected the minister’s request to stay the judgment pending appeal, warning that continued delay could deepen the harm both to Saban personally and to the public interest in an independent police force.
Saban, whose name became politically charged because of her role in the investigations surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and her later testimony in his criminal trial, had meanwhile asked the court to hold Ben-Gvir in contempt, arguing that he was treating the judgment as though it had been frozen even though no stay had been granted.
Her motion asked the court either to compel him to sign within days or, failing that, to deem the promotion effective retroactively and have it carried out without him.
Ben-Gvir frames appeal as dispute over police promotion process
Ben-Gvir’s appeal does more than challenge the district court’s remedy. It also tries to recast the entire case as a dispute over administrative process and separation of powers. According to the filing, the minister did not make a final decision rejecting Saban’s promotion but instead sought further review by senior police command before reaching one.
The appeal argues that the court erred by treating that position as a final refusal, by intervening before a completed administrative decision existed, and by intruding into a statutory area that the minister says the law reserves exclusively to him.
The filing further revives two broader lines of attack that have shadowed the case from the outset. One concerns the substantive criticisms Ben-Gvir has raised regarding Saban’s past conduct as an investigator, especially in relation to the phone-search litigation involving Netanyahu aide Yonatan Urich.
The appeal repeatedly leans on the fact that the Supreme Court, in the Urich proceedings, found serious defects in the investigative conduct at issue, and it argues that those matters should have been weighed before any promotion decision was finalized.
The second concerns Saban’s legal representation by the NGO Movement for Quality Government in Israel. Ben-Gvir argues in the appeal that the petition should have been dismissed at the threshold because the pro bono representation amounted to an unlawful benefit to a public servant and because the issue, in his telling, was never properly neutralized by police legal advisers.
Those arguments have been part of the broader campaign around the case, but they remain allegations advanced by the minister, not findings adopted by the district court in his favor.
Responding to publication of the appeal, MQG said the filing had not yet been lawfully served on the petitioner but had already made its way to the media - “as is the minister’s habit,” it said, accusing Ben-Gvir of preferring to conduct legal proceedings through headlines rather than in court. The group said Saban would continue to litigate the case in the competent courts and added that the court had already spoken clearly and on several occasions.
That wider context is part of why the case has drawn unusual attention. From the commissioner downward, senior professional officials supported Saban’s promotion, and previous court rulings in the case accepted the argument that prolonged obstruction in such circumstances could chill investigators and damage police independence.
Ben-Gvir, by contrast, has insisted that a minister is not a rubber stamp and has framed the matter as a test of whether elected civilian authority can still exercise real discretion over senior police appointments.
For now, the appeal places the matter before the Supreme Court, but it also sharpens a question that has been present from the start: whether this is principally a dispute about one officer’s record, or whether it has become a proxy battle over political retaliation, the autonomy of law enforcement, and the judiciary’s ability to enforce its own rulings when a minister refuses to carry them out.