Ben Gvir is the symptom of Israel’s woes. Netanyahu is the cause
Ben Gvir's presence and position in Israel is entirely down to Netanyahu refusing to draw a line and prioritising power over principle
Itamar Ben Gvir is a clown. But not the funny kind.
A wannabe Mussolini who, as it happens, was also widely seen as something of a buffoon. Ben Gvir is just as vain, just as deluded, just as self-serving and just as destructive. Like the Italian fascist, he treats politics as theatre. He understands the power of spectacle. He attempts to project himself as the strong man, the embodiment of force and action. However, the only action Ben Gvir has ever seen, is when he attacked and failed to defeat a fully laden clothes rack in a racially motivated attack in an Arab market.
Ben Gvir is a small man in every sense, petty, provincial and weak, a second-rate political performer who feeds off confrontation, stages provocations, mugs for the cameras and mistakes swagger, spectacle and cheap acts of humiliation for leadership.
Last week’s stunt at Ashdod port was simply one more grotesque example. Sumud flotilla activists, detained and posing zero threat, forced to kneel, heads bowed, cameras rolling, Ben Gvir strutting through the scene with his little flag and his stupid smile, like some bargain-basement Il Duce performing for his political base.
For the record, that does not detract from the fact that the Sumud flotilla was nothing more than a cynical PR stunt organized and funded by Hamas and its allies, peopled by useful idiots and performative narcissists. There was little or no aid on the boats, and not one ordinary Gazan benefits from this scam in any way whatsoever. It was wholly legitimate to intercept the boats, on their way to commit a crime. The naval blockade is legal. Breaking it is illegal. The activists should have been apprehended processed and deported. Ben Gvir however, decided to make it all about him. He undid all the effort and the excellent work of the IDF.
Ben Gvir’s record is not a matter of opinion, or political spin. Fifty-three indictments. At least eight criminal convictions. Convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organisation. This is a man who kept a portrait of terrorist and mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein, who slaughtered twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in Hebron, hanging in his home for years.
Ben Gvir has spent years showing Israelis exactly who he is, repeatedly inflaming tensions around the Temple Mount, exploiting one of the most volatile issues in the region as a stage for provocation. He taunts opponents, brandishes a handgun (an illegal act) for effect. Indeed, as a convicted criminal, he should not be allowed to carry a firearm. He has turned public life into a pathetic series of endless confrontations in which outrage is the goal.
Ben Gvir is loud, crude, inflammatory and wholly predictable. Grotesque, dangerous and deeply problematic as Ben Gvir is, he is not the main story here. He did not force his way into government. He did not seize power by stealth. He is the direct result of political malfeasance, moral rot and naked self-interest.
Ben Gvir is the symptom. Netanyahu is the virus.
In a desperate bid to cling to power, just three months after stating on national television that Ben Gvir was unfit to be a government minister, Benjamin Netanyahu laid out the red carpet and invited him in. Netanyahu legitimised his radical supremacist ideology, handed him authority and gifted him the critical and highly sensitive government office as Minister of National Security. Just to be clear, Netanyahu handed this eight-times convicted offender authority over the police.
It is Netanyahu who is ultimately responsible for this debacle. His defenders will say Israeli politics is messy and coalition governments require difficult alliances. That argument collapses the moment the price of power is selling your soul, and that of the country, to the most extreme perversion of Zionism, while handing power and influence to religious zealots and extremist fanatics.
This is not pragmatism, compromise or the unavoidable messiness of proportional representation. It is moral surrender and a descent into the abyss.
Alongside Ben Gvir sits Bezalel Smotrich and others who, once in power, dragged Israeli politics ever deeper into racial grievance, messianic zealotry and ideological absolutism, helping create a government in which extortion, provocation, intimidation and political thuggery infect the corridors of power.
In Judea and Samaria, the rise in Jewish nationalist violence, intimidation and terror is part of that same wider rot, in which ideological extremists increasingly feel emboldened, politically validated and ever more confident that the boundaries of acceptable conduct are shifting in their favour.
Characters like street provocateur Mordechai David and his gang are not some aberration. They are a part of the machinery of hate cultivated by this government, cynical opportunists eagerly embraced and exploited by the government to further sow division, inflame tensions, intimidate opposition and deepen unrest.
Every theatrical stunt, racist outburst, act of cruelty, and abuse, is one more gift to Israel’s enemies. Evidence of brutality, moral rot, abuse of power, and disregard for international law, held up before the world. It only strengthens those who seek to demonise, dehumanise and isolate the Jewish state, while making the work of countering false accusations and anti- Israel propaganda, infinitely harder.
Israel’s enemies do not need to invent false narratives when ministers like Ben Gvir, Smotrich and others provide them with propaganda gold.
Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised a state “based on freedom, justice and peace”, ensuring “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex”, and guaranteeing “freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture”.
Ben Gvir and his allies spit on it, and on the very ideals upon which the country was built, seeking to turn Israel from a Jewish and democratic state that espouses freedom, justice and equality, into a form of religious nationalist authoritarianism.
Ben Gvir is a comic strip character, a parody of himself, a deluded racist thug with a camera addiction, exactly what he has always been. Netanyahu is all too aware of the considerable damage inflicted, both at home and abroad, by the very forces he legitimised, empowered and unleashed on Israeli public life. For him however, it’s a price worth paying.
Netanyahu should have fired Ben Gvir on the spot after the fiasco in Ashdod. Ironically, it may even have earned him some additional votes in the upcoming election. But Netanyahu is a discredited, self-serving, desperate coward who sees the writing on the wall and will indulge this madness for the sake of just one more month as prime minister.
In the coming months, five at most, Israel goes to the ballot box. The worst government in the country’s history, a rancid gang of criminals, religious zealots, fanatics and sycophants, will finally answer to the people for its failures, its corruption and its betrayal.
Ben Gvir and his perverted ideology will hopefully, be pushed back to the political fringes, stripped of the power and influence, they should never have been allowed anywhere near in the first place.
Make no mistake, left in power, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and their cohorts represent the single greatest threat to Israel, its values, its way of life and its very future.
That may be acceptable to a desperate and compromised Benjamin Netanyahu. But not to the people of Israel, who will pretty soon send them all packing.
Gary Cohen is a writer and filmmaker. His substack can be found here:
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