Ben-Gvir and the Generation He May Leave Behind

A politician’s most lasting legacy is rarely the seats he wins, but the ideas he makes ordinary.

A generation of young Israelis is coming of political age in a country where the promises of peace have become distant memories. Many are preparing to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, or are already in uniform. Their political identities are being shaped not by the optimism of Oslo, but by terrorism, repeated wars, and the trauma of October 7.

On October 27, roughly 550,000 of them will vote for the first time, a bloc large enough to decide 10 to 12 Knesset seats, according to an analysis by Israel’s Channel 12 (N12). They lean decisively right: 74 percent describe themselves as right-wing or center-right, against 23 percent on the left or center-left.

Yet they have not rallied behind a single leader. In the same survey, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit drew 5 percent of first-time voters, trailing Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu at 6 percent each. N12 did find one telling movement: some young haredi voters who might once have backed Shas are drifting toward Ben-Gvir.

That is why the more consequential question is not how many votes Ben-Gvir wins next week. It is whether he has already helped redraw the boundaries within which this generation thinks: whether he reflects its convictions, or has helped shape what it considers acceptable.

The shift did not begin on October 7. In the months preceding the Hamas attack, hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrated against Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul. Yet beneath those protests, deep political divisions were already evident. The young Israelis who defended democratic institutions were not necessarily the same young Israelis now drawn to the hard right.

October 7 intensified an existing divide. For a generation raised amid conflict, promises of compromise seem less convincing than promises of strength.

Ben-Gvir has understood how to speak to that frustration. His confrontational rhetoric, amplified through social media, offers certainty where established leaders have offered complexity. He promises security without hesitation and national identity without apology.

That appeal was visible long before October 7. During the 2022 campaign, Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem attributed Ben-Gvir’s pull on young voters to the “clarity” he offered amid an unprecedented political crisis. Halevi knows the terrain: as a teenager he followed Rabbi Meir Kahane, Ben-Gvir’s ideological forebear, and later chronicled his disillusionment in Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist.

That same year, Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute told Jewish Insider that “most of their voters are young men,” largely from Israel’s socioeconomic periphery, and that it was Ben-Gvir, more than his partner Bezalel Smotrich, who drew young, disaffected voters looking for an anti-establishment voice. Political consultant Josh Hantman made a related point: with Israel’s rapid population growth, tens of thousands of new voters enter every election cycle, and they sit well to the right of older Israelis.

But demanding security is not the same as endorsing every policy pursued in its name. Not every young Israeli who supports Ben-Gvir condones violence against Palestinians. That distinction matters if we are to understand his appeal rather than simply condemn his supporters.

Still, Ben-Gvir’s rise cannot be separated from Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu did not create Ben-Gvir’s ideology or his following. But in 2021 he helped broker the merger that carried Otzma Yehudit into the Knesset on a joint list with Religious Zionism, and after the 2022 election he made Ben-Gvir national security minister, an expanded post overseeing the police and the Border Police in the West Bank. A politician whose positions once placed him outside the mainstream now held ministerial authority. What served Netanyahu’s immediate interest in staying in power will have consequences that extend well beyond his own career.

By early 2024, the dependence ran both ways. In February of that year, in his first interview with a Western news outlet as a minister, Ben-Gvir told Dov Lieber of The Wall Street Journal that he supported encouraging the “voluntary” emigration of Palestinians from Gaza. The Journal connected Ben-Gvir’s rejection of a proposed hostage deal to Netanyahu’s announcement, later that same day, that he too opposed it, and concluded that Netanyahu increasingly needed him. Ben-Gvir’s own forecast was blunt: “God willing, I will go far.”

For young voters, political boundaries are set partly by what their leaders make acceptable. When previously marginal positions acquire ministerial authority, they become part of ordinary political debate. That may be Ben-Gvir’s most lasting legacy. A first-time voter who casts a ballot for Religious Zionism or Yisrael Beytenu is still voting in a landscape Ben-Gvir helped reshape. Influence is not measured only in seats.

The implications are most troubling in the West Bank, where violence by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians has raised serious questions about the rule of law and government accountability. Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric and political positions have placed him at the center of that controversy.

The distinction between defending Israel and tolerating violence against civilians is fundamental. When it blurs, the consequences are felt not only by Palestinians and Israelis, but by Jews throughout the world.

Israel’s international standing is shaped by far more than one politician. Yet the actions and rhetoric of senior government officials influence how the country is perceived. For Diaspora Jews, defending Israel’s legitimacy while questioning its government’s conduct has become an increasingly difficult distinction to communicate.

There is, however, another model of security leadership, and he is now a leading contender to replace Netanyahu.

Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, leads the centrist Yashar party, which an average of mainstream polls now places level with Likud at 22 seats. He is hardly a figure of the traditional Israeli left. Like nearly all of Netanyahu’s rivals, he has broadly supported Israel’s military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. In 2024 he resigned from the war cabinet, citing the prime minister’s lack of strategy. And he speaks to a generation in uniform with an authority few politicians can claim: his son, Gal Meir Eisenkot, was killed in combat in Gaza at 25.

Eisenkot has emphasized institutional accountability, national unity, and opposition to extremist settler violence. His candidacy challenges the assumption that national security and democratic restraint are competing objectives.

Yet the N12 survey of first-time voters diverged from national polls in which Eisenkot leads Netanyahu as the preferred prime minister. His message, it seems, has not yet reached the voters it may matter to most.

That is the choice facing Israel’s younger generation: not simply between right and left, or between Netanyahu and his opponents, but between different understandings of national strength.

Netanyahu needed Ben-Gvir’s political support. Ben-Gvir benefited from Netanyahu’s legitimacy. But their partnership may leave a political inheritance neither man will ultimately control.

The question is not simply whether Ben-Gvir will remain powerful after October 27. It is whether the generation coming of age under his influence will come to regard restraint as weakness, or recognize it as an essential part of strength.

———

Karen Lehmann is a Washington, DC–based journalist and photographer who writes on American politics, public policy, Israel, and culture. She is a columnist for Man and Culture and a blogger for The Times of Israel, and her work has appeared in the Washington Examiner, JNS, and the Jewish Journal, among others.