Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen said he intends to seek Israel’s premiership, telling a podcast this week that “the public is pushing strongly” and that a real change in leadership requires him to step forward.
“To make a real difference, I need to be prime minister,” Cohen told journalist Yasmin Lukatz on her podcast. He argued that the job should be seen as a position of leadership rather than a purely political role. “The leadership product I will try to sell is about leadership. When there is an election date, I will consider whether to run,” he said.
Cohen added that his family’s views have shifted on the matter. “In the past, my household told me to avoid it,” he said. “Today the house says in many ways, ‘It is decreed upon you, you have no choice.’”
Cohen, 62, served as director of the Mossad from 2016 to 2021 after a 38-year career in the intelligence service. During his farewell ceremony in June 2021, he highlighted the agency’s successes under his tenure, including operations targeting Iran. “We penetrated the very heart of the Iranian enemy,” he said at the time, citing the Mossad’s 2018 operation to seize Iran’s nuclear archive, which Israel presented as evidence of Tehran’s military nuclear ambitions.
For the past two and a half years, Cohen has been widely viewed as a potential political heir to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and was even considered a future leader of Netanyahu’s Likud party. But he retreated from the spotlight after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the ongoing Gaza war, opting not to announce political plans while no election was on the horizon.
Cohen’s remarks mark the clearest signal yet that he is positioning himself for a political role. Still, he stopped short of an outright declaration, saying his decision would depend on the timing of the next national vote.