He celebrated his 50th birthday with a cake decorated with a noose, said he planned to surround imprisoned Palestinians with crocodiles, and appeared in videos berating foreign activists detained at sea while trying to deliver aid to Gaza, forcing them to kneel at his feet with their faces pressed to the ground.
اضافة اعلان
For many people in Israel and around the world, Itamar Ben-Gvir is seen as the aggressive face of Israel’s far right and a marginal political figure, despite having spent more than four years in government as national security minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But with elections approaching next week, opinion polls show growing support for his Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power, party, which has expanded beyond its traditional base of hard-line settlers in the occupied West Bank to young urban voters who may previously have regarded him as someone whose actions crossed the line.
According to a poll conducted by the Agam Labs at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jewish Power supporters are not only younger than the average Israeli voter, but as many as one-third of them are expected to be voting for the first time.
“I thought he was a little crazy, but then I actually looked at what he was saying, and it all made sense,” said 18-year-old Gabriel Marmon, a first-time voter from Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem.
Marmon was referring to Ben-Gvir’s backing of legislation passed in March making hanging a standard punishment for Palestinians convicted of attacking Israelis. Ben-Gvir celebrated the legislation with a cake decorated with a noose and a matching pin.
Israeli courts are likely to reject the law, among other reasons because it does not impose the same punishment on Jews.
Ben-Gvir is also making gains in Tel Aviv, a city whose residents trace their origins to different parts of the world and which has long been a stronghold of Israeli liberalism. Odelya Kidmi, 41, said his policy of expanding gun permits for Israelis had “given me hope again.”
“It is almost like President Trump’s concept of achieving peace through strength, but this is peace through Jewish power,” Kidmi said. Her sister survived the Hamas-led attack on the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023.
A “Toxic Mix of Hard-Line Positions”
Israel will hold its first election since the 2023 Hamas attacks on October 27. Many Israelis blame Netanyahu’s government for failures that contributed to the attacks, the deadliest in Israel since its establishment.
Opinion polls indicate that Netanyahu’s Likud party is on course to lose roughly one-third of its 32 seats in the 120-member Knesset.
It remains too early to say whether Netanyahu’s opponents will finally be able to remove Israel’s most right-wing government since the country’s establishment, amid a broader shift to the right among voters, particularly younger Israelis.
Polls show that neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor the main Jewish-led opposition parties, headed by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, is expected to secure a majority.
However, Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, which relied in 2022 on a joint list with two other far-right groups to clear the electoral threshold, is now projected to win eight or more seats on its own.
That would put it roughly on a par with the remnants of the former Labor Party, which governed Israel for generations and is now known as the Democrats. It is the only major Jewish-led party that continues to support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Global Condemnation of Ben-Gvir’s Record
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, another key far-right figure in the governing coalition, has faced competition from Israel’s crowded right wing over his hesitation regarding exemptions from military service for religious seminary students, angering many nationalists.
But Ben-Gvir, who represents the more extreme wing of the right, has faced no comparable threat to his supporters’ enthusiasm. On the campaign trail, he speaks in terms of Jewish pride and vows to seize more land that he says was promised in the Bible.
“We have returned home after 2,000 years of exile, and we must be proud of that. We must be proud and conquer Gaza because it belongs entirely to us,” Ben-Gvir told cheering supporters at a Tel Aviv municipal headquarters this month.
Ben-Gvir, who declined to comment for this story, was known as a hard-line extremist long before Netanyahu brought him into government.
He was convicted in Israel in 2007 of inciting racism and supporting a banned terrorist organization after displaying a sign supporting Meir Kahane, a rabbi who was later assassinated and who had been imprisoned in both Israel and the United States for planning and carrying out violent attacks.
For years, Ben-Gvir displayed a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his home. Goldstein was a Jewish gunman who killed 29 Palestinian worshippers in an attack on a mosque in Hebron in 1994. Ben-Gvir said in 2020 that he would remove the portrait, describing it as a gesture aimed at denying a rival right-wing figure an excuse to exclude his supporters from the political bloc.
Since taking responsibility for prisons under Netanyahu’s government, he has boasted of imposing harsher conditions on Palestinians and reducing food supplies to minimum levels. Many prisoners have since emerged severely emaciated.
Ben-Gvir also drew widespread condemnation after posting a video mocking activists detained from a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza. The activists were forced to kneel with their hands tied after being intercepted in international waters.
Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway added Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to their sanctions lists last year over accusations of inciting violence in the West Bank. The European Union has discussed a similar measure but has yet to reach consensus.
For Ben-Gvir’s supporters, the international condemnation is a badge of honor. Yishai Fleisher, an adviser to Ben-Gvir and spokesman for settlers, said at the municipal headquarters that Jewish Power does not care about Israel’s image in the West.
“It is better that our region respects us first and accepts us. Then the rest of the world will understand that Israel is here to stay.”
Source: Agencies
