If Benjamin Netanyahu had hoped the winter storms, which returned to Jerusalem with a vengeance last week, would deter the protesters, he was wrong.

Outside his residence, tens of thousands of Israelis braved the lashing rain to chant furious slogans at him while the city’s police got busy with water cannons, with some smashing up the demonstrators’ cars.

In barely credible scenes, an incandescent retired general was dragged away by officers and senior politicians knocked down.

Their cause? Not the imposition of a sweeping new tax; nor even the resumption of fighting in Gaza, although that certainly spiced the brew.

Instead, the grievance that prompted such fury was the dismissal of a shadowy intelligence official, Ronen Bar, the director of the Israeli Security Agency, commonly known as Shin Bet.

The controversy has made little impact in the West, where the dismissal of a civil servant – fair or otherwise – would generally be regarded as within a prime minister’s proper remit.

Yet in Israel, it is greeted by many as a step on the path to dictatorship; a potentially irrevocable escalation in the constitutional crisis that has been brewing since before Oct 7.

On Thursday night, Mr Netanyahu’s coalition cabinet voted unanimously to dismiss Mr Bar, claiming a lack of trust in him. An unnamed source, understood to be close to the prime minister, later made the incendiary claim that the top spy had known about the Oct 7 attack hours before but failed to act.