The head of the Samaria Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, is one of the most powerful people in the Likud's Central Committee. Together with a group of local council heads in Judea and Samaria, he appealed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Dec. 27, asking him to investigate claims by detained minors that they had been tortured by the Shin Bet. These minors are suspected of torching the house of the Dawabsha family in the West Bank village of Douma on July 31.

“We call on you to prevent the entire State of Israel from being dragged down that path until it becomes the kind of regime in which the investigator is also judge and executioner,” they wrote, asking the authorities to catch the “real” perpetrators of the deadly crime.

Dagan used Facebook to update his followers about his appeal to the prime minister. By doing so, he signaled support for the extreme right’s campaign against the Shin Bet, accusing the government agency of using torture to extract confessions from the Douma detainees.

The campaign organized raucous demonstrations and applied massive pressure to politicians aligned with the settlers to de-legitimize the Shin Bet. Nevertheless, it all screeched to a halt, largely because of the firm positions taken by HaBayit HaYehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett and the party’s powerful woman, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. Both of them expressed unequivocal support for the Shin Bet. The Yesha Council, the umbrella settlement organization, also published a statement in support of the Shin Bet.