How Ben-Gvir became the evil genius of Israel's conservatives
ProfileAs the head of the third largest political force in Israel after the legislative elections, the politician promises to deliver to Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing bloc the majority it was missing.
Itamar Ben-Gvir is a spectacle: disheveled, funny, vulgar, with his shirt collar and white yarmulke askew, sweat on his forehead, unshaven face and uncombed hair. He storms around smiling, his eye constantly seeking the camera lens. He does not lack humor. He is violent. Homophobic, anti-liberal and anti-democratic. He believes in the supremacy of divine law and the Jewish people. He believes in revenge – first against Arabs, then against non-Jews. Convicted in 2007 for inciting hatred and supporting a terrorist organization, he is now the head of the third-largest political force in Israel. His Religious Zionist Party won 14 of 120 seats in Israel's parliament, with 10% of the vote.
In the elections on Tuesday, November 1, he delivered a majority to the right-wing bloc led by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a majority that had eluded "Bibi" since 2019.
He is demanding to be the new minister of public security. As the savior of Israeli conservatives, he is, in many ways, their driving force. "His Jewish supremacism is at the heart of the right today, no longer at its fringes. It runs through Netanyahu's [center-right] Likud, whose ideology is becoming weaker," explained the left-wing philosopher Assaf Sharon, who grew up in a religious settlement. This is provoking some soul-searching in Israel: What is Jewish fascism and how did the "Jewish and democratic state" come to this?
Born into a lower-middle-class family in Mevaseret Zion (a suburb of Jerusalem) to a father from Iraqi Kurdistan, Mr. Ben-Gvir joined Rabbi Meir Kahane's activists in the streets as a teenager in the early 1990s. This American extremist, struggling against his country's justice system, was elected to the Knesset in 1984. At the beginning of the First Intifada, in December 1987, Rabbi Kahane was however forbidden from running again. His party, Kach, was banned and then declared a terrorist group – as was his Jewish Defense League in the United States.
A neighborhood hero
Among those groups, Mr. Ben-Gvir found a family "and a great love for the Jewish people." In 1994, when Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, he saluted a hero. Until last year, he kept his portrait hanging in his home, under this verse from the Bible (Numbers, 25:13): "because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites," which concludes praising of the zealot Phinehas.
In 1995, Mr. Ben-Gvir made himself famous, at the age of 18, by tearing the emblem off the Cadillac of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was subjected to a fierce campaign from conservatives for having signed the Oslo peace accords. "We got his car, and we will get him too," he said to the cameras. Mr. Rabin was assassinated a few weeks later by a Jewish extremist. That year, the army chose to exempt the young activist Ben-Gvir from military service.
In his working-class neighborhood of Givat Ha'avot – a settlement perched on a ridge above a police station in the eastern part of the large Palestinian city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank – Mr. Ben-Gvir is a hero. His neighbor is Ben-Zion "Bentzi" Gopstein, the Kahanist founder of the Lehava group, whose militiamen hunt mixed couples (Jew and Arab, Arab and Jew) in the streets of Jerusalem. But unlike Mr. Gopstein, Mr. Ben-Gvir refused to limit himself to the fringe of violent action.
He became a lawyer, defending Mr. Gopstein, as well as two teenagers accused of burning a Palestinian couple and their baby alive in the village of Duma in 2015. The "young people from the hills," violent settlers at odds with the government, passed his cell phone number around. "I don't do it for the money," he told the left-wing daily Haaretz. "I really believe I have to help these people."
The settlements in Hebron are a refuge for the most ideological activists, a cradle for the ultranationalist, right-wing and religious Zionist Gush Emunim movement. But even there, Mr. Ben-Gvir remains an outsider. "The Gush Emunim don't like him. They have always used the Kahanists as a repellent: 'We are settlers,' they say, 'but we are not racists like them,'" said Tomer Persico, a researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. This old, elitist, scholarly and disciplined vanguard considers Mr. Ben-Gvir a thug, as he does not share their messianism. Deep down, he cares little about the Holy Land and the settlements. For him, only the race war matters. The religious Zionists are suspicious of the strict theocracy advocated by his teacher, Meir Kahane, for whom democracy was a non-Jewish concept: "The Torah does not abide by this nonsense," he said.
These ideological disagreements are increasingly a thing of the past. Pressured by Mr. Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party agreed to join forces with Mr. Ben-Gvir in 2021, along with a small homophobic group. In a cycle of five consecutive elections in four years, the former prime minister was trying to scrape some money together and make sure that the roughly 40,000 votes (1.88%) gathered by Mr. Ben-Gvir in the 2019 elections counted. Mr. Netanyahu was building an alliance certain of crossing the 3.25% mark, a score necessary to enter the Knesset.
Faunting his 'parliamentary immunity'
A member of the Knesset since March 2021, Mr. Ben-Gvir still prefers the street to the parliament, and journalists always find him at the hotspot of action. Last year, he was one of the three most present politicians on screen. He moved his "office" to a sidewalk in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, whose Palestinian inhabitants were fighting not to be evicted for the benefit of Jewish settlers.
He flaunted his parliamentary immunity and asked the police to protect him – which they did. During the riots that bloodied Israel in May 2021, he appeared alongside Jewish vigilantes. On the campaign trail in late October, he brandished a gun in Sheikh Jarrah and demanded that the police open fire on stone-throwers. But he also scolded his supporters in Jerusalem's Old Jewish Market, who shouted "Death to the Arabs!" He wants to expel all Palestinians from the Holy Land, but he only wants "the terrorists" dead. This has provoked a public debate: Has Mr. Ben-Gvir "changed"? It is now rare that television presents him as far right: He recently appeared, in a relaxed mood, on a cooking show.
But just three years ago, Mr. Ben-Gvir was still carrying on the essence of Rabbi Kahane's legacy. He told the daily Yediot Aharonot that "the big difference [between them] is that they hand us a microphone." His mentor was banned from Israeli state broadcasting. "Kahane was a pure racist. He didn't admit that there were any 'good Arabs.' Ben-Gvir, on the contrary, made that distinction. This allowed him to circumvent the law that banned his party in the 1980s," recalled Simon Epstein, author of a history of Kahanism (Les Chemises jaunes: Chronique d'une extrême droite raciste en Israël, "The Yellow Shirts: A Chronicle of the Racist Far Right in Israel").
Even his enemies acknowledge it: As a lawyer, Mr. Ben-Gvir has "talent" and he knows how to "play the game" of Israeli politics. "As student activists for peace along with Palestinians in the 2000s, we used to call him before our actions, so that he would come with his guys," said Assaf Sharon, the philosopher. "That was the guarantee that the media would follow. He would shake our hands, be nice and then we would yell at each other in front of the cameras."
'The true face of Israel'
Israel's Palestinian citizens (20% of the population) tend to see him as just another extremist, after many others who have emerged in the wake of Mr. Netanyahu. "He shows the true face of Israel. But, with or without him, we are still discriminated against," said Mudar Younes, head of a national committee of Arab mayors, before the November 1 election.
The Zionist left has since been experiencing a moment of existential, melancholic reflection. "Israel has never been a liberal democracy. The fact that its electoral system works is a miracle," said Anshel Pfeffer, a journalist at Haaretz and biographer of Benjamin Netanyahu. "It is a Middle Eastern state at war on the same territory with another [Palestinian] nation, where the majority of Jews come from countries [Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa] without a democratic tradition. People don't vote for Ben-Gvir because he is a racist but because he is one of them. It's a tribal reflex. But we would like our politicians not to indulge our lowly national instincts, to preserve the illusion that we are better than what we are."
As for those in the right wing, Mr. Ben-Gvir promises an institutional overhaul that would remove the Supreme Court's ability to veto laws and give full power to parliament. (TP-as directed by the "Right!”) Mr. Netanyahu's Likud party has long wanted to reform the justice system, and he said he will do so in a measured way. Fearing that he will become a hostage to Mr. Ben-Gvir in the government, he will seek other partners in the center. But the man is popular among Likud's base, who count on him to spur on their leader. The ideological right is largely in the majority and does not stomach having had the country "confiscated" for 18 months by a short-lived alternation government, led by the centrist Yair Lapid. It is savoring its revenge.