Itamar Ben-Gvir, the ultranationalist Israeli minister who was rejected by the army for his extremism

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir remained defiant on May 20, undaunted by international protests triggered by images of him mocking Gaza Flotilla activists, who appeared in videos kneeling and handcuffed with their faces to the floor in the port of Ashdod. “Whoever comes to our territory to support terrorism and identify with Hamas, will receive harsh punishment,” he warned on social networks, after several Western countries, including Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany, condemned Israel’s treatment of the activists, criticism that has even come from a handful of Israeli leaders. “We will not turn the other cheek,” Ben-Gvir railed.

“Welcome to Israel. We are the landowners here; that is how it should be,” the minister shouted at dozens of detainees as he waved the Israeli flag. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to distance himself from Ben-Gvir that same day. “Israel has every right to prevent provocative flotillas of Hamas terrorist supporters from entering our territorial waters and reaching Gaza,” he said in a statement. “However, the way that Minister Ben-Gvir dealt with the flotilla activists is not in line with Israel’s values and norms.”

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, agreed. “You knowingly caused harm to our state in this disgraceful display — and not for the first time,” he said in a statement on X regarding Ben-Gvir. “You are not the face of Israel.”

But Ben-Gvir’s conduct towards international activists is the same as it was prior to 2022, when Netanyahu hung on to power by creating a governing coalition with ultra-Orthodox and far-right parties that made a minister of Ben-Gvir, a man convicted eight times of anti-Arab racism and support for Jewish terrorist organizations.

Raised in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, the current head of National Security was 18 years old when the army refused to allow him to enlist because of his extremist views. At 19, he made headlines as a far-right activist by tearing the Cadillac hood ornament off then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car. Brandishing the emblem on television, he famously declared, “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too,” weeks before Rabin was assassinated. At that time, Rabin was promoting the peace process of the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians.

Back then, Ben-Gvir was active in Kach, a far-right religious Zionist organization, founded in 1971 by Rabbi Meir Kahane, which demanded the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza before they became a demographic majority. Kach split after the assassination of its founder and both entities were declared terrorist organizations in Israel. The designation came after one of the former members of Kach, Baruch Goldstein, entered a mosque in Hebron, in the West Bank, with an automatic weapon in 1994 and killed 29 people and injured 150 others while they were praying during Ramadan.

Thirty years later, as leader of the Jewish Power party with a reputation as a lawyer defending Jewish Israelis accused of violence against Palestinians, Ben-Gvir was ushered into the governing coalition. Pending several corruption allegations, Netanyahu needed the ultranationalists to remain in power.

During the election campaign that propelled him to power, Ben-Gvir promised that he would defend the death penalty “for terrorists.” Parliament approved this measure against Palestinians accused of attacking Israelis in March this year. Ben-Gvir won the National Security portfolio and often publicly displays a noose pin on the lapel of his jacket. Gone are the investigations against him for his support of Jewish supremacist organizations. His post puts him in charge of the police and the prison system, in which thousands of Palestinians languish — hundreds of them minors.

For human rights groups in Israel, the videos showing the mistreatment of the Gaza flotilla activists gives us some idea of what is happening inside Israeli prisons. Adalah, the organization that is in charge of defending the detainees of this last flotilla, has reported widespread physical and psychological abuse of international detainees. At least three activists have been hospitalized, according to Adalah, and dozens are suspected to have had their ribs broken.

“To me it’s just an indication of how badly the rights and welfare of detainees have suffered under [Ben-Gvir’s] leadership,” Bashi said. “A prison guard who sees his boss’s boss express pride in the mistreatment of foreign detainees will have no qualms about abusing Palestinian detainees and he won’t even have to be afraid to get caught. Ben-Gvir is saying that this behaviour is welcomed and encouraged at the highest level.”

The minister responded to the October 7, 2023 attacks that the Palestinian militia Hamas launched on Israel by hardening his already extreme line. He has distributed weapons to Israeli Jews in mixed cities where Palestinians with Israeli nationality also reside. He has delivered ammunition and military uniforms to Jewish groups that terrorize Palestinians and advance ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories, so that victims are unsure whether they are dealing with soldiers, or settlers dressed as soldiers. He is also responsible for the worsening treatment of Palestinians in prisons, described by B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, as “a network of torture centers.”

After four years in the governing coalition, Jewish Power will seek to maintain influence during elections scheduled for October in a right-wing Israel, where hostility toward Israeli Palestinians — a quarter of the population — is growing. Ben-Gvir’s ideas, which led a court to convict him of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organization in 2007, are no longer fringe. Back then, his posters bearing the slogans: “Expel the Arab enemy” and “Rabbi Kahane was right, the Arab MPs are a fifth column” were considered against the law. Now Ben-Gvir appears to be the law.

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