Few Israeli politicians provoke as immediate a reaction as Itamar Ben-Gvir. For much of the Israeli left and international opinion, he embodies the far right at its most alarming and repellent: Kahanism, radical nationalism, a taste for provocation and an authoritarian view of power. To his supporters, by contrast, he is the man willing to say openly what a growing segment of the country privately believes: that Israel has spent too long confusing moderation with weakness, and the defence of rights with the surrender of state authority.

There is some truth in both portraits. Neither, on its own, is enough to understand the man.

National Security Minister since late 2022, apart from a brief hiatus in 2025, Ben-Gvir oversees, among other bodies, the police and prison service. A lawyer by training who lives in Kiryat Arba, on the outskirts of Hebron, he first made his name defending far-right activists in court — prosecuted by the very state whose security apparatus he now partly controls.

His trajectory is extraordinary: a man from the most radical fringes of the Israeli right has made his way to the heart of power. But after building his career on denouncing the state’s impotence, he must now answer for his own ability to wield its power.

A past that cannot be erased

Ben-Gvir cannot be understood without Meir Kahane. As a young activist, he moved in Kahanist circles, a radical nationalist movement whose party, Kach, was barred from Israel’s 1988 elections for incitement to racism and later outlawed.

In 1995, weeks before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Ben-Gvir drew national attention by appearing on television with an emblem torn from the prime minister’s car. For years, he kept in his home a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994, before removing it in 2020. In 2007, he was convicted of incitement to racism and supporting an outlawed organisation after displaying signs that included the slogans “Expel the Arab enemy” and “Rabbi Kahane was right.”

That conviction did not involve participation in an attack or material assistance to terrorism, but propaganda activities connected to the Kach movement. It would therefore be historically false to portray his reputation for extremism as an invention of his opponents. It would be equally misleading simply to describe the conviction as “support for terrorism,” without further qualification.

Over the years, his rhetoric has changed. He says he no longer advocates expelling Arabs simply because they are Arab, but only those — Arab or Jewish — whom he considers enemies of the state, and he has sought to distinguish his Otzma Yehudit party from the historical Kach movement.

A genuine ideological evolution, or an adjustment in language? The question remains open. Politically, however, the strategy has worked: Ben-Gvir has become mainstream enough to enter government, but never enough to stop embodying the man who defies the system.

Why he appeals to some voters

Yet to reduce his rise to the mere radicalisation of Israel would be to miss the essential point.

Ben-Gvir has a remarkable........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)