Aggressive policing at Temple Mount (al-Haram al-Sharif) and escalatory rhetoric following Hamas rocket strikes from Gaza in early April have put Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s ultranationalist national security minister, back in the spotlight. Who is he, and what factors have driven his rise?

Pictured smiling as he entered a meeting of a badly shaken cabinet early this month, the cheerful exterior of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, is eloquent of his adept pragmatism, his powerful position in Netanyahu’s governing coalition, and his carefully managed media image.

Netanyahu’s commitment to support the establishment of a ‘national guard’ to deal with Arab disorder in Israel represents a key concession to Ben-Gvir from the embattled Prime Minister after he was forced to postpone his government’s flagship judicial reform proposals by a wave of mass protests and nationwide strikes, and following the mutiny and aborted dismissal of Yoav Gallant, his own defence minister.

It is also the latest in a series of controversies of Ben-Gvir’s making which have set alarm bells ringing amongst the Israeli opposition, Palestinians, much of the international community.

Since the 46-year-old leader of the ultranationalist, religious, right-wing party Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) assumed responsibility on 1 January 2023 for institutions such as the police and prison service, as well as patrols in the West Bank, he has stirred his base and outraged opponents by banning the display of Palestinian flags and visiting Temple Mount (al-Haram al-Sharif), which drew comparisons to Ariel Sharon’s notorious visit in 2000 which contributed to the Second Palestinian Intifada.

Aside from his considerable popularity – and commensurate infamy – Ben-Gvir’s career is so striking because it is starkly emblematic of how the religious Zionist right has successfully, if by no means smoothly, come into the political mainstream.

The key question which poses itself is how did a man who was deemed too dangerously radical to be permitted to do his military service, and who boasts a litany of criminal convictions for racism and similar offences to boot, come to be the high-ranking cabinet minister responsible for the very police force that viewed – and part of which arguably still views – him with such suspicion?

Shifting our focus from the man to his wider movement, the second – and more thorny – question is what are the underlying factors driving the unprecedented popularity of far-right and (broadly speaking) religious candidates, further polarising the Israeli political landscape?

The unprecedented success of far-right parties in in the elections of 1 November 2022, in which the Religious Zionist coalition – including Ben-Gvir’s own Otzma Yehudit, Bezalel Smotrich’s Tkuma (Religious Zionism) party, and Avi Maoz’s fervently anti-LGBTQ+ Noam party – obtained 14 seats in total, made them the third-largest grouping in the Knesset after Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud and Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid.

Together with the Haredi – ultra-orthodox – parties Shas (representing Mizrahim) and United Torah Judaism (representing Ashkenazim), the Religious Zionist coalition gives Netanyahu 64 deputies in the 120-seat Knesset, making for a slim majority but one with a strong right-wing and religious character.

Ben-Gvir’s ability to push for the post of national security minister in cabinet negotiations with Netanyahu is testament both to the strength of his electoral base and his willingness to formalise and expand the authority of far-right religious Zionists in the Israeli state.

However, this is the culmination of decades of operating outside mainstream political respectability, and in tense, both oppositional and tacitly symbiotic relationships with the institutions of the state.

Media image

Ben-Gvir’s cultivation of his media profile throughout his career has enabled him to forge a power base of supporters and reach a wide public.

Although some have justifiably cautioned against sweeping comparisons between Israeli extreme religious Zionists and the far-right in Europe and the USA, there are some significant areas of commonality in publicity strategies employed by Ben-Gvir and other far-right politicians.

Firstly, the generation of controversy is routinely employed by Ben-Gvir as a tool to gain media attention.

Prior to his provocative actions as a minister, this aim was advanced via publicity stunts such as his 2011 collaboration with the National Union MK Michael Ben-Ari to bring 40 Sudanese migrant workers to a luxurious swimming pool in Tel Aviv in what supportive media characterised as an attempt ‘to point out leftist hypocrisy’.

Such eye-catching ploys are somewhat reminiscent of tactics employed by other right-wing provocateurs, such as Trump’s campaign promise in 2016 to make Mexico pay for a ‘great wall’, and, on a larger scale, of Lukashenko’s exploitation of migrants at the Polish border as a political pawn in 2021.

Secondly, Ben-Gvir’s use of a range of different media, including both mainstream press and television, but also social media such as TikTok, have increased his exposure and connection with voters, outside the traditional public sphere of political broadcasting.

Thirdly, his often smiling, amiable, and slightly jocular public image, combined at other times with fulminating rhetoric and provocative incitement, has some echoes of styles of right-wing politics adopted by figures such as Trump and Farage which eschew decorum and offset their controversial opinions with a performative levity, though the context of violence and insecurity in Israel and the West Bank, and thus the consequences of incitement, are more extreme.

His 2019 plan to participate in a series of ‘Big Brother’, though unrealised, is indicative of his calculated self-image as someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously. Such a figure can appear to be more relatable and more of a ‘man of the people’, and has echoes of, for example, the half tongue-in-cheek posturing of Spain’s Vox party leader, Santiago Abascal, as a conquistador in a 2019 tweet.

Within and without the law

Ben-Gvir’s career as a lawyer has also been instrumental in enabling his political rise, forming a key bridge in his transition from being beyond the pale to enjoying greater respectability and substantial power within the state apparatus.

Though his previous convictions made his initial authorisation as a lawyer highly controversial, he and his Kahanist allies developed a strategy of working both within and outside the law, first as an activist, and later as a legal representative for Jewish settlers and extreme religious Zionists accused of crimes against Palestinians.

This included notorious cases such as the 2015 Duma arson attack in the West Bank, in which two Palestinian parents and their infant son were killed.

He thus provided extreme voices with a legal and political mouthpiece, boosting his profile and creating a niche as a more respectable, eloquent, and established arm of the Kahanist movement and its sympathisers.

Violence and polarisation

Incitement to and the threat of violence also continue to play a major role in Ben-Gvir’s strategic repertoire, and that of his extreme religious Zionist political milieu.

The most explicit face of this is flagrant settler violence, such as that perpetrated in Hawara in February, which Bezalel Smotrich, currently serving as finance minister, appeared effectively to condone in his subsequent – and later retracted – comment that ‘the village of Hawara needs to be wiped out’, though by ‘the state of Israel’.

Ben-Gvir’s early involvement in incitement to violence is evinced in his youthful television interview in 1995 making a thinly veiled threat to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin over the latter’s pursuit of the Oslo Accords – a threat which found a very real manifestation soon afterwards in Rabin’s assassination by Yigal Amir.

However, besides more explicit incitement to violence is a consistent theme of symbolic violence, to which Ruth Margalit alludes.

The promotion of martyr cults which glorify Jewish terrorists in which Ben-Gvir engaged as an activist have some similarities to the discourse of ideologically opposed extremist organisations such as Hamas with regard to Palestinian terrorists. This is reflected in his veneration of Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, via a (now removed) picture displayed in his home and even in his youth dressing as Goldstein at Purim.

Such performative, taboo-embracing actions again seek to generate controversy and attention, but also arguably shift the boundaries of acceptable, or at least practised, political discourse and behaviour, whilst also solidifying a base of supporters for whom extra-legal violence in the service of the ideal of Greater Israel is a real option.

Annual commemorations of Kahane, Ben-Gvir’s stated aim to ‘show who’s the landlord around here’, and explicit animosity towards Israeli-Arab politicians, are means of making Palestinians and Israeli Arabs feel unwelcome, subordinate, and threatened.

Ben-Gvir’s tactics of incitement and polarisation arguably give him an interest in encouraging violence, which tends to harden views and render more palatable extreme positions presenting themselves as the only defence against terror.

Perhaps ironically, this is potentially an interest shared with Palestinian militant factions diametrically opposed to Ben-Gvir, who are resorting to greater violence, and greater co-operation with each other, out of increasing disillusion with the Palestinian Authority and accommodation with Israel, and for whom an escalation in violence and subsequent reprisals are likely to bring more Palestinians round to the same opinion.

As Margalit identifies, periods of violence and instability have proved fertile for recruiting support for extreme religious Zionism amongst the scared, angry, and bereaved, and Ben-Gvir’s public profile was much boosted by his inflammatory role in the spring 2021 crisis, which saw outbreaks of violence in Jerusalem and other mixed cities, as well as in Gaza.

Furthermore, now Ben-Gvir is in government, the line between Jewish terrorism, a concept whose legitimacy Ben-Gvir has rejected, and state violence can be more easily blurred than ever.

Jewish settlers

Ben-Gvir’s rise is also partly predicated on appealing directly to the settler constituency.

Firstly, as a resident himself of Hebron’s Kiryat Arba settlement, Ben-Gvir lives on the front-line of settlement expansion in populated Palestinian areas, and is exposed to its dangers. That his wife, Ayala Ben-Gvir, publicly carries a gun, appeals to an image of settler self-sufficiency which emphasises the need for self-defence and the legitimacy of violence in the quest for a divinely-mandated Greater Israel.

Secondly, Ben-Gvir’s uncompromising public support for settlers’ interests when they are challenged enables him to continue his position as a legal defender of extreme religious Zionism in the political sphere, and the hands-on image that he wishes to present is illustrated by his wielding a pistol when confronted by stone-throwing Palestinian demonstrators in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem in October 2022.

Thirdly, that the Religious Zionist slate’s belief in the cause of creating a Greater Israel through annexation of the West Bank has not only not been toned down but has actually been made a theoretical pillar of the coalition agreements with Netanyahu’s Likud explicitly enshrines settler interests at the heart of government policy, reinforced by funding pledges.

Ultranationalists and the state

Ben-Gvir has also benefitted from partially toning down his image in an attempt to seek greater respectability. As Margalit highlights, Ben-Gvir’s ostensible disavowal of Rabbi Kahane’s most fervent anti-Arab sentiments in a November 2022 Kahane memorial speech represented a careful public relations balancing act in an attempt to increase his respectability.

There is perhaps some parallel here with Menachem Begin’s moderation of his position on his own path to political respectability from leader of the Irgun Revisionist paramilitary to leader of the Herut political party, such as in his agreement not to make the call for Greater Israel a part of the Gahal bloc’s programme in 1965.

However, the fact that Ben-Gvir and his ultranationalist allies have in fact led Netanyahu to make the pursuit of West Bank annexation stated government policy is a marker of just how much the political spectrum has shifted to the right.

This raises a wider point about the political and social context in which Ben-Gvir is operating.

Whilst his progress from suspect to national security minister appears in some respects paradoxical, the dominance of the Israeli Right for the last two decades since the breakdown of the Oslo (1994-5) and Camp David (2000) peace processes has greatly facilitated the normalisation of religious Zionist aspirations for a Greater Israel.

The Israeli right’s foundational ideological proximity to this idea, notwithstanding its numerous differences over issues such as the role of religion in society, is one that it ultimately has in common with the proponents of religious Zionism, even if there is a range of opinion on its practical implications.

The erosion of any imminent feasibility of a two-state solution is one to which the violence and polarisation which Ben-Gvir and the Kahanist-inspired milieu have contributed, but which has also been presided over by right and centrist governments under Sharon, Olmert, and Netanyahu, which have maintained and entrenched the occupation of the West Bank, notwithstanding Sharon’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

Right-wing rhetoric vilifying the Oslo Accords in 1995, including that of Netanyahu’s Likud and its supporters – not just of Kahanists such as Ben-Gvir – was dangerously provocative, setting the scene for Rabin’s assassination.

As Shira Rubin highlights, the often confrontational, but ultimately collusive relationship between the state and ultranationalist settlers and agitators has ultimately, in addition to their own persistence, done much to embolden and legitimise them.

Ultranationalist religious Zionists have arguably broadly benefitted from some of the same longer-term factors that have buttressed support for the Right as a whole. These include the normalisation of right-wing dominance in the government, demographic increases in the ultra-Orthodox and Mizrahi populations, and the influx of Jews from the former USSR, who often lean towards more right-wing parties.

Disillusion with post-Oslo peace proposals in the context of the Second Intifada and subsequent wars with Hamas and Hezbollah, and Netanyahu’s ability to achieve some regional normalisation via the Abraham Accords despite a patent lack of even a will to find a stable political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have also played a role.

Within this context, religious Zionist parties have in the past couple of years succeeded in gaining some ground over their right-wing competitors.

Factors shaping this include, as David E. Rosenberg argues, many right-wing voters’ disillusionment with Naftali Bennett over his pragmatic alliance with the Israeli-Arab Ra’am party and with left-wing parties, and with Netanyahu over his religious credentials; as Tomer Persico of the Shalom Hartman Institute suggests, a desire for a fresh, controversialist approach; and, at least for some, though not all of their voters, arguably because of the more explicit clarity of their message.

Though their electoral longevity remains to be proven, Ben-Gvir and his ultranationalist religious Zionists allies are a significant force, keen to entrench their power and make their presence felt.