Itamar Ben-Gvir: The More He Shocks, the More Entrenched He Becomes
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 political instinct. He identified concerns long underestimated by the traditional parties: organised crime, protection rackets, illegal weapons, riots in some mixed cities, and a sense that the Negev and the periphery had been abandoned. He brought all of this together under a word that has become central to his message: meshilut — “governance,” in the sense of the state’s capacity to enforce its authority.
Not everyone who votes for Ben-Gvir is, of course, a disciple of Kahane. Many simply believe that the state has shown too much weakness in the face of terrorism and organised crime, and that some elites care more about the rights of those who challenge the state than about the safety of ordinary citizens.
One may regard that diagnosis as exaggerated. Dismissing it does not make those who share it disappear.
This is also where Ben-Gvir’s singular talent lies. Unlike many radical politicians who seek to moderate themselves once in power in order to broaden their base, he appears to have little interest in winning the approval of those who despise him. He seems to understand that part of his strength comes from precisely this dynamic: every attack by his opponents can become, in the eyes of his base, proof that he is unsettling the very people they want unsettled.
That reputation for consistency is reflected at the ballot box. While Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party repeatedly hovered near the electoral threshold in 2026 polls, Otzma Yehudit regularly polled at around six to ten seats, ranking in some surveys as the country’s third- or fourth-largest party.
The test of power
But entering government changed the rules of the game. Denunciation is no longer enough; results are required.
And it is precisely on meshilut — his signature issue — that his record is most vulnerable. Crime in Israel’s Arab community remains extraordinarily high. In 2022, the final year before he took office, 116 people were killed in criminal violence in the sector. The figure more than doubled the following year and has remained at devastating levels, with 252 people murdered in 2025.
It would be unfair to lay responsibility for this at the feet of a single minister. The criminal organisations, proliferation of weapons and decades of underinvestment long predate him.
But Ben-Gvir himself asked to be judged on his ability to reverse that trend.
One cannot build a career denouncing the state’s loss of control, secure the ministry responsible for restoring it, and then explain indefinitely that failure is the fault of those who came before.
The real test of Ben-Gvir, then, is not merely whether he is an “extremist.” It is whether he is effective.
In other areas, however, his actions have more closely matched the expectations of his base. After October 7, 2023, he sharply accelerated the arming of eligible civilians and the expansion of local security squads. He also significantly toughened conditions for Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorism-related offences, proudly declaring that “the prisons have become a nightmare for terrorists — and I am proud of that.”
Here again, the divide is almost complete: what scandalises part of international opinion answers, for many of his voters, a demand to break with what they see as years of excessive restraint. With Ben-Gvir, toughness is never merely policy; it is also political theatre.
The same mechanism is evident in the debate over the death penalty for perpetrators of deadly terrorist attacks. Ben-Gvir was one of the main architects of the law passed by the Knesset on March 30, 2026, making it a symbol of his approach to deterrence. He celebrated its passage with his characteristic theatricality, champagne glass in hand, promising executions “one by one,” while opponents denounced the measure as discriminatory and more likely to gratify his electorate than genuinely improve security. The measures have drawn fierce criticism from human rights organisations and parts of the judiciary. Yet they also command genuine support in a society deeply traumatised by the October 7 massacre and the treatment of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
This is one of the keys to the Ben-Gvir phenomenon: what contributes to his delegitimisation abroad can simultaneously strengthen his legitimacy among a segment of the Israeli public.
The man shifting Israel’s right
Nor can his importance be measured solely by his ministerial record.
As the leader of a party whose MKs may be indispensable to a right-wing majority, Ben-Gvir has considerable leverage over Benjamin Netanyahu. On Gaza, hostage agreements, the Palestinian Authority, the settlements and the Temple Mount, he represents one of the coalition’s most hardline poles.
His resignation from the government in January 2025, in protest at a ceasefire and hostage-release agreement, followed by his return when the fighting resumed, showed that he was prepared to turn a strategic disagreement into a government crisis.
Netanyahu does not, however, yield to all his demands. He has notably contradicted him over the status quo on the Temple Mount. But every sensitive decision must now take an additional question into account: how far can the prime minister go without risking the loss of Ben-Gvir?
More profoundly, Ben-Gvir has helped redraw the boundaries of Israeli political debate. Re-establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza, the “voluntary emigration” of Gazans, changing the status quo on the Temple Mount, imposing an exceptionally harsh prison regime: ideas once confined to the margins are now debated within the government itself.
Ben-Gvir has not necessarily succeeded in imposing them. He has succeeded in making them discussable. That may be his most important political victory.
He also enjoys a rare advantage: his voters generally know what he thinks and often see his actions follow his words. When he said he would leave the government if the agreement with Hamas was approved, he did. When the fighting resumed, he returned.
That consistency matters in a political system where voters have grown accustomed to shifting alliances and abandoned promises.
The pariah who thrives
Abroad, however, Ben-Gvir has become almost untouchable. In June 2025, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom announced personal sanctions against him and Bezalel Smotrich, citing, among other things, statements they deemed to incite violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
For a serving Israeli minister to be sanctioned by five democracies traditionally allied with Israel is a momentous development.
Ben-Gvir, however, has made little effort to soften that image. His language remains deliberately provocative, at times brutal. In his view, verbal restraint belongs to precisely the political culture of caution and impotence against which he has defined himself.
At times, he asks questions that part of the public considers legitimate: Why does the state tolerate certain lawless enclaves? Why should Jews be unable to pray at Judaism’s holiest site? Why should convicted terrorists enjoy prison conditions considered overly lenient? He then frames or answers those questions in a way that almost automatically turns the debate into a scandal.
His appetite for provocation thus supplies some of the very material used to delegitimise him.
The caricature exists. But it did not emerge from a vacuum.
And yet these two trajectories do not cancel each other out: a pariah in much of the international arena, Ben-Gvir remains one of the most firmly established leaders of his political camp within Israel.
To understand is not to absolve
That is why Ben-Gvir deserves better than anathemas.
His radical past is real. His provocations are often deliberate. His relationship with state institutions raises serious questions. And his record on personal security must be measured against the promises he himself made.
But his political abilities are equally real. He identified some of the deepest fractures in Israeli society before many others did, has a remarkable ability to communicate with his electorate and now represents a substantial segment of Israeli opinion.
Calling him a fascist does not answer the question of why he wins votes. Conversely, portraying him merely as a victim of the left, the judiciary or the elites does not answer the question of whether he governs effectively.
Becoming a tribune requires talent. Winning votes requires political instinct. Becoming a statesman requires effectiveness, judgement and, above all, a sense of limits.
Ben-Gvir has already completed the most spectacular passage of his career: from the system’s most radical fringes to the heart of power — and perhaps further still, by pulling part of the Israeli right’s centre of gravity towards him. He has also, for the most part, crossed the second divide, the one separating the tribune from the statesman, changing not only the discourse but the state’s actual practices. The glaring exception is crime in Israel’s Arab community, where the failure remains complete.
His real problem lies elsewhere. Itamar Ben-Gvir knows how to win power, influence those who hold it and put it to use. What he has not learned to master is himself: his taste for needless provocation, which adds nothing to his record but, with each new outburst, further damages Israel’s image abroad and inflames domestic tensions in a society already at boiling point.
