When Itamar Ben Gvir posted a video of himself taunting rows of bound and kneeling activists from the Gaza-bound flotilla, castigation came from foreign governments, human rights NGOs and the Knesset opposition — but it also flowed from his own right-wing allies in government, who distanced themselves from the crude bully in their ranks, and criticized the damage he caused, unforced, to Israel’s already battered international image.

Which may have been exactly the point.

Ever since he was a far-right teenage activist, Ben Gvir has had a showman’s instincts, and that hasn’t changed during the time he’s been a far-right senior government minister, even though he’s in charge of some of Israel’s most sensitive security agencies.

Now that elections are approaching, that penchant for political theater has provided Ben Gvir a clear way to demonstrate to voters that he’s different, not from his enemies on the left, but from his friends on the right who have long served with him — that he’s willing to stick it to Israel’s enemies, no matter what the consequences are for the country’s reputation.

And it comes amid a larger collapse of the concept Israelis refer to as “mamlachtiyut,” the idea that the country’s politics should be decent, statesmanlike and focused on the national interest.

“There is a crisis of trust in Israeli institutions and a widespread sense that few if any in the Israeli leadership make ‘mamlachti’ decisions,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster, political analyst and columnist with the dovish Haaretz newspaper, told The Times of Israel. People, she said, “view the leadership as inherently responsive to specific parties, sectoral interests, not for the good of the whole people.”

Ben Gvir’s tenure at the helm of the National Security Ministry has been defined by his stunts, from waving an Israeli flag on the Temple Mount to his combative visits to Bedouin towns to the noose-shaped pin he wore to the Knesset when he pushed for a law mandating the death penalty for Palestinian terrorists........

© The Times of Israel