Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering appointing Prof. Gabi Siboni as National Security adviser. After Netanyahu dismissed Tzachi Hanegbi as NSC chief last October, Gil Reich was appointed acting head of the council. However, Reich has been named head of the Defense Ministry’s security department and will leave on June 1. According to sources, Siboni is considered a leading candidate, though Reuven Azar, who served as Israel’s ambassador to India and previously as deputy NSC chief and Netanyahu’s diplomatic adviser, is also in the running.
Siboni, 69, a colonel in the reserves, is an academic specializing in military and security affairs. He is considered a right-wing figure and appears as a panelist on various programs on Channel 14. During his mandatory service, he reached the rank of major while serving as commander of the Golani Reconnaissance Unit during Israel’s security zone years in southern Lebanon. In the reserves, he served as chief of staff of the Golani Brigade and as chief of staff of a division in the Northern Command.
In addition to being an engineer by profession, Siboni has spent years researching military and security issues, with an emphasis on security and cyber expertise. He headed programs at the Institute for National Security Studies, but said he was shown the door there and later became a senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security.
During Operation Rising Lion in June 2025, Siboni said of Netanyahu: “He is emerging like Atlas, holding the world and the security of the State of Israel on his shoulders alone. He should be saluted. He will be remembered as one of the greatest leaders of the Jewish people in the modern era. He simply brought us to our finest hour.”
In another interview in June last year, Siboni said of the prime minister: “I recommend that the Iranians remove the famous clock they put up counting down the time until Israel’s destruction. What we have done there in recent days is simply amazing. I have no words to describe the prime minister’s and the leadership’s long-range vision. I have quite a bit of criticism of the prime minister on various issues, but on this issue, I stand amazed, astonished by the leadership and decisions he is showing here.”
Siboni is considered a close friend of former IDF chief of staff and Yashar! party chairman Gadi Eisenkot. In September 2019, the two co-authored a document titled “Guidelines for a Security Doctrine for Israel.” In an interview with Maariv in February this year, Siboni said that over the years, some friends had cut ties with him, but his relationship with Eisenkot remained “stable and deep.” Asked whether they had distanced themselves because of his support for Netanyahu, he replied: “I think Netanyahu is like a voodoo doll that people stab in order to have an effect. But if there were no Netanyahu, there would be someone else. It doesn’t matter. The struggle in the country is a struggle for control. It has nothing to do with anything else.”
At the beginning of the year, his book, “From Canaan — From the Projects to Redemption,” was published. In an interview about the book, Siboni noted that when he was a soldier in Jerusalem, he chose to stay with retired Supreme Court President Moshe Landau. “I was 19 or 20, full of reverence for the court. The conversation with him impressed me greatly,” he said.
But from there, he said, a gradual erosion began. “It started with Aharon Barak and the statement that ‘everything is justiciable.’ Then came additional periods, and I saw how the court slowly ate away at every good thing,” Siboni said at the time. He said the esteem he once had for the system turned into painful criticism. “I look at myself over the years and see how my esteem keeps falling and falling, to the point of catastrophe. When I look at the system today, I see a pile of gray bureaucrats, with no representation for my position, not even one.”
‘Fight in the Gaza Strip as if there are no hostages’
Siboni frequently criticizes the IDF and the defense establishment. In his book, he argued that the IDF did not make use of the credit it was given in the October 7 war, and that former IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi did not want to assume civilian responsibility for what was happening in Gaza, allowing Hamas to preserve its power as the sovereign authority. Siboni also voiced opposition to partial hostage deals during the war. In an interview with Galei Israel in August 2025, he said: “We have no choice but to fight in the Gaza Strip as if there are no hostages.”
In an article co-authored with retired Brig. Gen. Erez Weiner, Siboni argued that the phenomenon of settler violence does not exist and that left-wing organizations and international actors artificially inflate incidents in Judea and Samaria, the biblical names for the West Bank. The two also argued that the term “settler violence” is nothing more than a well-funded, coordinated campaign run by far-left organizations such as Yesh Din, B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence.
A day after a hearing last week at the High Court of Justice on petitions calling for the dismissal of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Siboni told Galei Israel: “There is not one High Court justice who represents me. I look at the joke called the Supreme Court. We are stuck with a group of gray, inarticulate, low-grade bureaucrats. When you take a low-grade person and give him authority, he can bring catastrophe upon you. In 100 years, they will look at us here and say: This is what Sodom looked like. They are doing Sodom to us. We are living in Sodom.”
The connection between Siboni and Erez Weiner was also mentioned in the “Harpaz document” affair, which roiled Israel’s defense, political and legal establishments at the beginning of the previous decade. Siboni received the forged document — which purported to outline a plan by then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak to promote Yoav Gallant as IDF chief of staff — both from then-Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and from Weiner, who was then an aide to IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi. Siboni testified about this to police and was mentioned in detail in the state comptroller’s report on the affair as someone who passed the document, through an intermediary, for publication by journalist Amnon Abramovich.
First published: 17:40, 04.26.26