Since arriving at the helm of the Israeli ministry of national security in 2022 and for two years, Itamar Ben-Gvir has worked to conscript settlers and arm them against the Arabs, withdrawing police protection from humanitarian aid convoys headed to the Gaza Strip and allowing them to be attacked by settlers. This is in addition to repeated incursion into the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Ibrahimi Mosque. According to the Financial Times, overall crime rates have increased on his watch, reaching record levels – from 116 murders in 2022 to 244 in 2023 through the killing of 170 Palestinians Arab-Israelis in one year.
The racist conduct of the 1976-born Ben-Gvir did not come out of the blues. He belonged to a Mizrahi Jewish family from the Middle East from where his father descended. His mother, Shoshana Ben-Gvir, joined the extremist Irgun Jewish movement, an offshoot of the Haganah militia which committed numerous terrorist crimes in Palestine. Everything surrounding Ben-Gvir is racist. His wife, Ayala Nimrodi, is an activist in the Temple Mount Administration group, a movement that seeks to change the staus-quo in the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
At the age of 18, the occupation army exempted Ben-Gvir from military service because of his extremist past. He continued his activism, working as coordinator of the Kahani youth in the Kach Movement established by the Rabbi Meir Kahane, the mastermind of the idea to forcefully expel and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. During that time, specifically in 1995, Ben-Gvir appeared on television protesting against the Oslo Peace Accord, brandishing the emblem of the car of the then-Israeli prime-minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and shouting “we got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too,” only for Rabin to be assassinated few weeks after that statement.
In his youth, Ben-Gvir was influenced by various religious figures, including Dov Lior, former chief Rabbi of the Kiryat Arba settlement in Hebron where Ben-Gvir himself lives. He is the spiritual father of the religious Zionist current and Jewish terrorism, who called for the destruction of the Arabs and Palestinians, for control of the land from the sea to the river and for the killing of all Palestinians including men, women, children and the aged.
Despite that, Ben-Gvir found the object of his long-cherished wish in the Kahan Kach Movement which openly sought to achieve the Israeli objectives of genocide through revolution against the existing secular regime in Israel, the occupying power, through disintegration of the regime and the establishment of Jewish religious state where there will be no place for non-Jews. Ben-Gvir had told the Haaretz Jewish newspaper that he found in the Kach much love for the Jewish people and truth and justice, in reference to openly canvassing for Jewish exclusivism at the expense of others and rejection of a pluralistic Jewish state.
Ben-Gvir studied and practiced law to defend the crimes of the extremist settlers. He defended several people accused of committing terrorist crimes. Notable among these was the crime committed by the two settlers from the so-called “price tag” militia accused of burning the house of the Palestinian Dawabsheh family in 2015, resulting in the martyrdom of the infant Ali Dawabsheh. While the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the incident as “Jewish terrorism”, Ben-Gvir denied it saying that there was no such thing”, an indication of the unprecedented far-right level Ben-Gvir represents.
Ben-Gvir entered the world of politics in 2012. However, his party “Jewish Power” failed repeatedly to meet the electoral threshold. In 2021 he finally succeeded in entering the Knesset for the first time. His coalition represents the third party in the Parliament in terms of members – 14 out of 120.
It seems clear that Ben-Gvir remained on the Kahana path. This is evident from his upbringing. and from his perpetration of crime under the pretense of defending Jewish rights, more so because he was convicted of multiple crimes leading him to toning down his rhetoric by using populism and humour on the social media platforms to form a fan base that brought him to the Israeli government coalition, something the Kahana failed to achieve. This is why Ben-Gvir was considered different even if he agrees with the objectives of the Kahana.
The personality traits of Ben-Gvir are similar to those of the spiritual father of Kahanism, the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was assassinated in 1990 and who had founded the Jewish Defence League (JDL) 1968 to defend Jews in America. He moved to Israel in 1971 and founded the Kach party which called for ideas combining (supremacy of the Jewish race based on the sanctification of the “land of Israel” with racism against Arabs whom he described as enemies that must be expelled from that land).
For Rabbi Shaul Magid, researcher at the Zionist Shalom Hartman Institute, in the research published by the Institute under the title “Rise in Kahanism a Response to Crisis in Religious Zionism”, the Zionism adopted by Kahane did not work with the secular state but against it. He pointed out that it used to believe in the need to undermine secular Zionism in Israel, the occupying power, and to dismantle it through political means. Kahane proposed that Israel should implement the Jewish law which obliges the non-Jews in Israel to remain as resident strangers or to leave the country with compensation, or face forced expulsion.
Ben-Gvir is an embodiment of what the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem, called Jewish supremacy, believing like other Kahanists that the Arabs have no place on the “land of the Jews”. Ben-Gvir did not relent at all in using suppression against them and this is was is expressed by the name of his party, “Jewish Power”, using violence and force to achieve the objectives of Kahanism. Ben-Gvir boasts with the records of his predecessors when he mentioned in a previous interview in 2015 that he was indicted 53 times and convicted 7 times, including for incitement against Arabs and obstructing the work of the occupation police, supporting a terrorist organisation Kach, which was proscribed after the Ibrahimi Mosque carnage of 1994, especially after it was categorized as a terrorist organization in 1995 by many states such as the United States, Japan and the European Union.
By B’Tselem’s own admission, Israel, the occupying power, through its various governments, has for a long time imposed a regime of Jewish supremacy over the Palestinians.
The difference between the reality of the occupation state and the Kach movement or even Ben-Gvir is being open about the racist objectives hidden behind the veneer of secularism. The time was not ripe during the time of Kahane as it became clear from the unprecedented war of genocide against the Gaza Strip since October 2023 that the general mood in the Israeli society has changed and has become closer to the idea of Kahanism, especially with Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, orchestrating behind the scenes the voices of their voters.
A 1984 opinion poll showed that 15% of Israeli Jews support the idea of “expelling Palestinians to Arab states and encouraging Palestinian Arabs to emigrate.” However, by 2016, a poll conducted by PEW revealed that this number had risen to 48% of Israeli Jews consenting that “Israel must expel Palestinians or exterminate Arabs from the country.” The same poll showed that 79% of Israeli Jews believe that they must receive preferential treatment above others.