Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of Chaos

As unrest roils the country, a controversial figure from the far right helps Benjamin Netanyahu hold on to power.
An illustrated portrait of Itamar BenGvir standing in front of a scene that includes Israeli prime minister Netanyahu...
Ben-Gvir built a career on provocation. As national-security minister, he’ll oversee what one official calls a “private army.”Illustration by Yonatan Popper

Late last year, as Israel swore in the most right-wing government in its history, a despairing joke circulated online. A picture broken into squares to resemble a CAPTCHA—the test designed to tell you from a robot—depicted the members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. The caption read, “Select the squares in which people who have been indicted appear.” The correct answer involved half of them. It was the kind of message that has become typical of Israel’s center and left in recent years: grim, cynical, ultimately resigned.

A few weeks later, Netanyahu’s cabinet introduced the first stage in a judicial overhaul that would weaken the country’s Supreme Court and render the government largely impervious to oversight. Right-wing legislators had floated a similar measure before, but it was regarded as too drastic. What changed, Netanyahu’s opponents say, is that he is a defendant now, on trial for allegedly providing political favors to tycoons in exchange for personal gifts and positive press coverage—charges that he denies. By removing constraints on executive power, the overhaul threatened to place Israel among the ranks of such illiberal democracies as Hungary and Poland. In an extraordinarily blunt speech, the country’s chief justice, Esther Hayut, called it a “fatal blow” to democratic institutions. Since then, tens of thousands of protesters have poured into the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities each Saturday. One marcher’s placard summed up the sentiment: “For Sale: Democracy. Model: 1948. No brakes.”

Netanyahu leads Likud, a party defined by conservative and populist ideas. Likud has long taken hard-line positions on national security, but its leaders traditionally venerated the rule of law, maintained a balance of power, and upheld free expression. Netanyahu, too, used to court centrist voters, attempting to convince the undecided. But, as peace talks with Palestinians have failed and religious nationalism has gained force, the Israeli left has shrivelled, and Netanyahu’s party has become more extreme. Recently, a Likud lawmaker put forth a proposal that would effectively bar many Arab politicians from running for parliament.

Protesters warn that Israeli headlines have begun to read like a manual for future autocracies, with ministers seemingly handpicked to undermine the departments they run. The new justice minister intends to strip away the judiciary’s power. The communications minister has threatened to defund Israel’s public broadcaster, reportedly hoping to funnel money to a channel favorable to Netanyahu. The minister of heritage has called organizations representing Reform Jews an “active danger” to Jewish identity.

No one, however, offends liberal and centrist Israelis quite like Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir, who entered parliament in 2021, leads a far-right party called Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power. His role model and ideological wellspring has long been Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn rabbi who moved to Israel in 1971 and, during a single term in the Knesset, tested the moral limits of the country. Israeli politicians strive to reconcile Israel’s identities as a Jewish state and a democracy. Kahane argued that “the idea of a democratic Jewish state is nonsense.” In his view, demographic trends would inevitably turn Israel’s non-Jews into a majority, and so the ideal solution was “the immediate transfer of the Arabs.” To Kahane, Arabs were “dogs” who “must sit quietly or get the hell out.” His rhetoric was so virulent that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle used to walk out of the Knesset when he spoke. His party, Kach (Thus), was finally barred from parliament in 1988. Jewish Power is an ideological offshoot of Kach; Ben-Gvir served as a Kach youth leader and has called Kahane a “saint.”

Ben-Gvir, who is forty-six, has been convicted on at least eight charges, including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism, compiling a criminal record so long that, when he appeared before a judge, “we had to change the ink on the printer,” Dvir Kariv, a former official in the Shin Bet intelligence agency, told me. As recently as last October, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with him, or even to be seen with him in photographs. But a series of disappointing elections persuaded Netanyahu to change his mind.

Netanyahu has been Israel’s dominant political figure for a generation, serving as Prime Minister for an unprecedented fifteen years. In 2021, though, he was sidelined by a parliamentary coalition that, for the first time, included an independent Arab party. During the elections last year, Netanyahu returned with what one legal scholar described as “a knife between his teeth.” To secure a winning coalition, he orchestrated an alliance between Jewish Power and another far-right party, Religious Zionism. The alliance ended up winning the third-largest share of seats in parliament, outperforming expectations so radically that Netanyahu now faced the disagreeable prospect of sharing power with Ben-Gvir—a man whom the former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described as a more imminent danger to Israel than a nuclear-armed Iran. Rather than give him a sinecure, Netanyahu named him the national-security minister. In Israel, the embattled left wing stopped asking whether a figure as divisive as Ben-Gvir could reach the highest levels of power. Instead, the question became: Can he be contained?

The Heichal David event hall, near Jerusalem’s central bus station, hosts weddings, bar mitzvahs, and, once a year, a memorial for Kahane. The organizers chose the Heichal David, an m.c. there once announced, because it was the “only hall in Jerusalem that doesn’t employ Arabs.” Last November, thirty-two years after Kahane was killed by an Egyptian American extremist in a Manhattan hotel, a rowdy crowd gathered in the hall to commemorate his legacy. T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Kahane Was Right” sold for nine dollars. Women—the few who attended—sat cordoned off behind a screen.

Ben-Gvir was scheduled to be the first speaker of the evening, but for weeks the press had dangled the question of his appearance as if it were a cliffhanger on a reality show. (Ben-Gvir agreed to join the cast of “Big Brother” in 2019, but an early election derailed the plan.) Ben-Gvir has been Kach’s most visible ambassador. On his first date with his future wife, they visited the grave of Baruch Goldstein, an extremist settler who, in 1994, had gunned down twenty-nine Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs, a holy site for Muslims and Jews in Hebron. Until recently, a photograph of Goldstein hung on the Ben-Gvirs’ living-room wall, at their home in the Kiryat Arba settlement in Hebron.

Ben-Gvir began attending the Kahane memorial when he was a teen-ager, and eventually became its host. He used to call up reporters, promising them provocations—such as a noose to threaten an Arab lawmaker—to entice them to cover the event. The movement was considered marginal. “It was a joke how small it was,” Kariv, the former Shin Bet official, said. It has since expanded to include a political party (Jewish Power), a financial arm (the Fund to Save the People of Israel), and a militant anti-assimilation group (Lehava, or Flame). In the latest election, according to one estimate, a third of all Israeli soldiers voted for Ben-Gvir.

“Whatever you do, don’t look like a balloon.”
Cartoon by Harry Bliss and Steve Martin

As Ben-Gvir entered government, he insisted that he had become more moderate, assuring one audience that he no longer believed “Arabs should be killed.” Two of his mentors on the far right even broke with him over what they saw as unacceptable concessions. “Itamar may kill eight mosquitoes, instead of the two that his predecessors killed, but that’s still not draining the swamp,” Baruch Marzel, who served as a spokesman for Kach, said. The rift, an insider told me, was real: Marzel is a dour figure, a “first-generation Kahanist.” Ben-Gvir is “second generation,” tempering his bigotry with an Internet-friendly sense of humor. Some of his activists wear “Notorious I.B.G.” shirts. (In one of his TikTok videos, viewed 1.3 million times, he kicks a soccer ball that he suggests represents Arab politicians. “I’m practicing kicking Odeh, Tibi, and Abbas to Syria,” he says.) But the rift also helped Ben-Gvir electorally. He could now plausibly claim that he no longer represented the farthest extreme of the Israeli right.

Ben-Gvir became a lawyer in his mid-thirties, and has often displayed a knack for staying just within the bounds of the law. In 2015, he chided his followers to stop shouting “Death to the Arabs”: “You should say ‘Death to the terrorists.’ That’s legal with a stamp.” Raphael Morris, a hard-right activist who heads a movement called Returning to the Temple Mount, told me, “I’ve learned from him how to challenge the system without crossing a red line.” Kariv said that Ben-Gvir is “an extremist, but a pragmatic one. He knows how to walk between the raindrops.”

Before the elections in 2019, advisers, hoping to cement what the press described as a newly “statesmanlike” image, urged Ben-Gvir to remove Goldstein’s photograph from his wall. “I told him that people are afraid to vote for him,” Berale Crombie, his campaign strategist at the time, told me. Ben-Gvir refused. “He was very scared of losing his base,” Crombie said. After two failed attempts to win a seat in the Knesset, he finally relented: the picture came down. “Symbolically, this was crucial,” Crombie, who remains friendly with Ben-Gvir, said. Within two years, according to one analysis, Ben-Gvir’s support among voters went from a thirtieth of Likud’s to as much as a third.

To secure a senior ministerial position, though, Ben-Gvir had to distance himself from the ideology that had made his reputation without turning away its ardent believers. At the memorial, he worked the room, smiling. He has a round face, wire-rimmed glasses, and a large white kippah that often sits askew. As he took the stage, his smile faded, and security guards closed around him. Ben-Gvir told the audience that he owed his religious identity to Kach, but he also emphasized moderation: “It’s not a secret that today I’m not Rabbi Kahane.” People shifted in their seats; some began to boo. “I don’t support expelling all Arabs, and I won’t make laws creating separate beaches for Jews and Arabs.” More jeers. “But of course, of course we will work toward expelling terrorists from the country”—here the boos turned to applause—“for the character of the state, the settling of its land, and its Jewish identity.” At the end of the speech, people rose to their feet, snapping photos. Still, his bodyguards had to whisk him out.

News coverage of the speech centered on the signs of dissent: “Ben-Gvir Booed at Rabbi Kahane’s Memorial.” For Ben-Gvir, this was a boon—the emphasis on the jeers was a step toward mainstream acceptance. But, as Rino Zror, a journalist who has spent years covering the far right, told me, it seemed as if the focus on the booing “came from him.” Other journalists agreed, noting that Ben-Gvir had allowed a partial draft of his speech to leak out on social media. Last year, a supporter who was worried about his transformation approached Almog Cohen, a Jewish Power politician. “It’s a ruse,” Cohen said, in an exchange that was caught on tape. “You know what a Trojan horse is?”

Most Israelis first heard of Itamar Ben-Gvir in the fall of 1995—a tense time in Israeli history. Even as suicide bombers struck with alarming frequency, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a historic peace accord with Palestinian leaders. But the deal conceded tracts of Israeli-occupied land in the West Bank, which the right wing considered a betrayal. Protests grew violent. On October 11th, a nineteen-year-old Ben-Gvir appeared on television, wearing a pale-blue T-shirt, with his arm in a sling. He was holding a Cadillac emblem that had been ripped from the Prime Minister’s car. “Just like we got to this emblem, we can get to Rabin,” he said. Three weeks later, a right-wing law student named Yigal Amir approached Rabin at a peace demonstration in Tel Aviv and shot him twice. Rabin died soon afterward.

Seven weeks later, attorneys from the state commission of inquiry visited Amir in his cell and questioned him about that night. Amir said that on the bus to Tel Aviv he had met a Likud activist “who told me that Itamar Ben-Gvir wanted to kill Rabin at the demonstration.” (Ben-Gvir declined to be interviewed for this article, but an aide called this account false.) Amir knew Ben-Gvir from right-wing activist circles, but, he told the investigators, he had laughed off the idea that he might commit a killing. He was just a kid, Amir suggested—not a murderer but a provocateur.

Ben-Gvir grew up in Mevaseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem. When he was a child, he lived in a scruffy area that was once a transit camp for Jewish immigrants from Kurdistan, where his mother’s family originated. In the years before the creation of the Israeli state, she had fought against British rule with the underground group known as the Irgun. His father, whose family came from Iraq, sold produce at the Jerusalem market.

In time, Ben-Gvir’s family moved to a more upscale, tree-lined part of town. His parents were right wing, but they weren’t ideologues; he has said that they occasionally voted for the left-wing Labor Party. Like many mizrahi, or Sephardic Jews, they were somewhere between secular and observant. Ben-Gvir was different. He became religious at twelve, and at fourteen—during the first Palestinian intifada—he was radicalized. “There was one murder after another, and I went to my mother and told her, ‘This must be solved,’ ” he said last year, in an interview with the news site Mako.

One Friday, he asked his father to drive him to downtown Jerusalem, where a demonstration of leftist women convened each week. There, he formed a counter-protest of one. But he had made a rookie mistake: the women habitually dressed in black, and Ben-Gvir had worn black, too, so he was obliged to call his father for another shirt. Before long, though, he met Baruch Marzel and another Kach agitator, who introduced him to the movement. “At first, I thought that they were too extremist for me, but at one point I realized, Wait a minute, this isn’t what the media portrays,” he said.

Those who knew Ben-Gvir as a teen-ager recall an intelligent, charismatic boy with an easy smile. One school friend said that he was “a bit of an outsider,” but added, using a term that denotes aggressive behavior, “There were much scarier arsim than Itamar.” Ben-Gvir attended a vocational high school in Jerusalem, where a former teacher remembered him as serious and engaged—sitting in the front row, “like he didn’t want to be disturbed.” His affiliation with Kach was known at school, the teacher added, but it wasn’t unusual: “Most students came from very right-wing families.”

Ben-Gvir’s ambition made him an outlier among the Kahanists. “Most of them are parasites,” Kariv said. “They get up at noon, they don’t study, and they don’t work. Ben-Gvir was always very driven.” Over time, he began recruiting others to Kach activities, which Kariv said ran mostly to vandalism: spray-painting “Kahane Was Right” and “Arabs Out” on buildings across Jerusalem; sabotaging water heaters on Arab families’ roofs. A former Kach member told me that recruiting for the organization peaked in the aftermath of violent attacks: “Say there’s a bombing and you hear someone yell ‘Death to Arabs.’ You come up to him, and ask, ‘Want to join us?’ ” Ehud Olmert, who was Jerusalem’s mayor at the time, told me, “Ben-Gvir belonged to a group that thrived and blossomed on the backs of those murdered in terrorist attacks.” Once, after an attack in the Jerusalem market, Olmert was touring the scene when three men began to stalk him, shouting “Death to Arabs!” and “Coward!” One of them was Ben-Gvir. Olmert says that he turned and punched him in the face.

At sixteen, Ben-Gvir became a fixture at Kahane’s Jewish Idea Yeshiva, in Jerusalem. (When I mentioned Ben-Gvir’s “student days” to the former Kach member, he laughed and said, “It’s not that kind of yeshiva.”) There, a rabbi named Yehuda Kreuzer imparted the tenets of Kahanism: that the idea of coexistence with Israel’s Arab population, which makes up twenty-one per cent of the country, is, as Ben-Gvir puts it, “babble” (Kahane: “there’s no coexistence with cancer”); that Jewish women should be saved from Arab men (Kahane: “the incredible pollution of the sacred Jewish seed”); and that the “path” to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an “exchange of populations.” In other words: Palestinian expulsion from Greater Israel, territory that includes the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

While Ben-Gvir’s old high-school classmates served in the Israel Defense Forces, he stayed at the yeshiva, absorbing extremist ideas. The Army had refused to conscript him. “There are only very few that we don’t recruit,” a former senior defense official told me. Why not Ben-Gvir? I asked. The official stared at me and said, “Give someone like that a weapon?”

As the new minister in charge of supervising Israel’s police force, Ben-Gvir oversees a special-operations unit tasked with breaking up armed riots. For many Israelis, this is alarming. In one poll, forty-six per cent of respondents described him as “unworthy” of such a sensitive post. But Ben-Gvir’s performance in last year’s election was strong enough that Netanyahu granted him an expanded portfolio, which includes broad responsibility for “national security” and authority over border-patrol units in the West Bank—what the departing defense minister, Benny Gantz, called a “private army.”

In 2021, Ben-Gvir returned to his old yeshiva for Independence Day. “Rabbi Kreuzer used to tell us students that one day we will reach positions of influence,” he told a crowd of students. “For years, they delegitimatized us. They presented us as a bunch of haters, delusional, crazy. They distorted our positions, lied, and cheated. But slowly, over time, I saw how their attitude toward us changed. Maybe it’s social media, which the press couldn’t ignore. Suddenly, the Israeli people are exposed to us. . . . That, gentlemen, is amazing. Seculars, religious people, from the south and from the north, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, haredim who study, and haredim who work. Everywhere we went, we were wrapped in love.”

To many observers, the growing acceptance of Ben-Gvir and his allies has more to do with a rise in populist outrage, and with the weakening of Israel’s left wing. In 1977, after years of Labor rule, Likud came to power for the first time. Its Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, balanced ardent nationalism with respect for the judiciary, and a generation of conservative politicians followed his example—including Netanyahu, who joined Likud in 1988. But Netanyahu soon began to capitalize on increasing hostility to what he called the “élite”: leftists, judges, academics, the press. After Rabin was killed, the peace accord that he had signed fell apart. As Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank grew, so did the incidence of Palestinian terror attacks, and an increasing number of centrists began to agree with the right-wing argument that “there is no partner for peace.” With the rise of social media, the divisions only deepened, or at least became more visible: in one recent poll, twenty-two per cent of Israelis reported “hating” left-wing voters.

Ben-Gvir made an early career of stoking that kind of hatred. As a young Kahanist, he heckled stage actors known for leftist views, and handed out eggs to throw at marchers in gay-pride parades. For Purim, he would dress up as Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer. In 2011, he invited the press to a public pool in Tel Aviv, where he appeared with forty Sudanese migrant workers. He bought them all tickets to enter the pool, and, while cameras rolled, handed them swimsuits. “I want all the pampered Tel Avivians to understand that if we give human rights to the Sudanese they will come here,” he told reporters. Laughing, he called out to the migrants, in English, “Swim! Swim!”

He has been surprisingly frank about the purpose of his agitprop. “I use Kach summer camps and Rabin memorials . . . so that you would come and interview us,” he told an Israeli media-watchdog publication in 2004. “The ideology itself you would never cover.” Ben-Gvir has spent years cultivating journalists who report on the Jewish settlements, becoming what one described as their “pet extremist.” He keeps a notebook with a running tally of reporters and the news items he feeds them. Chaim Levinson, a longtime journalist for Haaretz, told me, “When you are pressured by your news desk to find a hilltop youth”—a nickname for the most hardened settlers—“you call Itamar.” Last year, during a wave of deadly attacks, Ben-Gvir received more screen time on television than any other Knesset member, except for the Prime Minister.

Ben-Gvir “was always aware that it was all a kind of show,” Mikhael Manekin, a veteran left-wing activist, said. Many Israeli liberals took this to mean that he was not an ideologue, Manekin added, “but the fact that he could joke with you didn’t make him any less dangerous.” When Manekin brought groups to tour Hebron, Ben-Gvir regularly showed up to confront them. “He would throw eggs, and curse, and yell at us,” Manekin said. “And then, when the tour was all over, he would come up to me, smiling, and ask, ‘So, when are you coming again?’ ”

Cartoon by Roz Chast

This past December, I flew to Europe to meet Gilad Sade, who was raised by Tiran Pollak, Kahane’s right-hand man, and served for years as one of Ben-Gvir’s closest confidants. On the phone, before our meeting, Sade asked that I not reveal his exact location. He hasn’t visited Israel in four years. “If I set foot in Jerusalem, they will break my bones,” he said. “They,” he explained, were former Kach members who now belong to other branches, including the anti-assimilation group Lehava, founded by Bentzi Gopstein, a Kahanist whom Ben-Gvir considers a “dear friend.” (Gopstein declined to comment for this article.) Sade and I met in a basement café. He arrived looking like one of thousands of Israelis on their post-military trip around the world: shaggy curls, stubble, hiking clothes, a raffish earring. There were no indications of his former life—the large knitted kippah and long sidelocks that typify West Bank settlers.

I asked Sade how long he had known Ben-Gvir, who is a decade older than he is. “Since I can remember,” he said. “He was like an older brother to me.” Ben-Gvir was also his boss. He used to pay Sade and other teen-age boys about sixty dollars for a full night of spray-painting slogans. Sade said that he also encouraged such extracurricular “activities” as slashing car tires and smashing windshields. (Ben-Gvir denies this.) Most of the action took place in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and Hebron, but occasionally the boys rented a car and went from city to city on a binge of vandalism. Sade played me a recording in which a man who remains close to Ben-Gvir confirmed that Ben-Gvir had paid him, too, for graffiti when he was a teen-ager. “When we talked about money, Itamar used to say that all he had gotten in exchange for working for Bentzi was a shawarma,” the man joked. (I am withholding his name because he was a minor at the time.)

Sade told me that, shortly after his bar mitzvah, Ben-Gvir sent him to spray Kach graffiti in a central intersection in Jerusalem. He was arrested and brought to a police interrogation room downtown. But when he gave the interrogator his name he was told, “There’s no Gilad Pollak in the system.” The interrogator thought that he was being uncoöperative, and started beating him. That was when Sade learned that Pollak was not his birth name. He had been adopted; his biological father was Palestinian. He discovered later that a fund-raising video had circulated within the Kach movement, showing him as a three-year-old, held by Rabbi Kahane. In the video, Kahane tells an American donor, “Nothing can prove the importance of what we’re doing more than this little boy here. He could have been throwing rocks now at Jews, if we hadn’t taken him and his mother away” from an Arab village. The donor—a Biblical archeologist named Vendyl Jones—can then be seen handing Kahane a check. Ben-Gvir showed the video at the annual Kahane memorial as recently as 2017.

The news about Sade’s origins radicalized him even further, and he dropped out of school after the ninth grade. “Suddenly, you have twenty police files for graffiti, twenty police files for destruction of property,” he said. Ben-Gvir, he added, took advantage of his eagerness.

In 2001, Hezbollah declared that it had a video documenting militants’ capture of three Israeli soldiers a year earlier. The United Nations also had video relevant to the kidnapping, but initially refused to hand over an unedited version to Israel. Many on the Israeli right were furious. One night that summer, according to Sade, Ben-Gvir told him to get a ski mask, then drove him to a U.N. base in East Jerusalem. Ben-Gvir dropped him off around the corner and handed him a wire cutter, indicating where he could breach the fence without getting caught. “He sent me to fucking break into a U.N. base in Jerusalem and destroy their cars,” Sade told me. “I was fucking fourteen! I could have been killed!” (An aide to Ben-Gvir said that Sade fabricated this account out of personal animosity.) Inside the compound, Sade says, he punctured the tires of every car he could find and spray-painted slogans: “U.N. Out” and “Kahane Was Right.” He emerged to find Ben-Gvir waiting in his battered car, Hasidic music blasting from the speakers. “Nu, nu, nu?” he asked Sade, energized.

Kariv, the former Shin Bet official, could not confirm the break-in, but said that it sounded like “classic Itamar.” The Kahanists kept themselves at a distance while minors did the dirty work. They “were very aware that for us to interrogate a minor is much more complicated,” he explained. Yet Kariv sounded almost charmed by his former target. “I really appreciate where he came from, how hard he worked, and where he’s going,” he said. It wasn’t the only time I came upon this dissonance: people who spoke about Ben-Gvir’s overt racism were just as eager to talk about his charisma, basic niceness, and work ethic. (Years later, Kariv ran into Ben-Gvir at a television studio and congratulated him on the recent birth of his child. Ben-Gvir was taken aback. “You shabakniks know everything!” he said, using a common term for Shin Bet agents. Kariv pointed at his arm, where there was a wristband from the maternity ward. Both men laughed.)

Sade worries that Ben-Gvir’s superficial affability has distracted many Israelis from the danger that he presents: “From everything I know about Itamar and Kahanism, the goal is very simple—it’s to sow chaos.”

Sade, who left Kach more than a decade ago, now works as a reporter in places like Ukraine and Kosovo, filing stories for Israeli radio and for international news sites. In 2014, he uncovered some startling information. While appearing in a film about his life, “Best Unkept Secret,” he learned from his mother that the story of his birth featured in the fund-raising video had been a hoax. Sade’s father was not Palestinian, she told him. She was never “saved” from an Arab village. She had been a young single mother from a traditional home, and her mother had pressured her to seek help from the Kach movement. Once there, she had been coaxed into making a promotional video extolling the movement. “They exploited her, and they exploited me,” Sade told me. “Beyond being dangerous, these people are sophisticated. They’ve learned how to keep their own hands clean while leaving scorched earth under the feet of other people.”

Two weeks after the recent election, Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, invited the wives of the incoming coalition leaders (all of whom are men) to brunch at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Jerusalem. A photograph of the event spread on social media. The Netanyahus are secular, but Sara’s guests were all religious, and had on long skirts and hair coverings—making them a distinctly unrepresentative sample of Israeli society, in which the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious sectors represent roughly thirty per cent of the populace. The image also went viral for another reason: Ben-Gvir’s wife, Ayala, was wearing a pistol in a holster that was visible over her skirt. Ayala, who is thirty-five, tweeted later that day, “[I] live in Hebron, mother of six sweet kids, travel through terrorism-ridden roads, married to the most threatened man in the country, and yes, I have a gun. Deal with it.”

There are, according to the Shin Bet, two things that tend to mellow extremists: military conscription and marriage. Ben-Gvir skipped conscription, and he married someone even more radical than he was. Ben-Gvir met Ayala Nimrodi around 2002, when he was twenty-six and she was fifteen. She was one of a handful of girls in the Kach movement, and she was a devoted adherent. “I happened to see a leaflet of Kahane, read it, and found many answers,” she told the news site Ynet. About a year after their meeting, she was arrested while occupying an illegal outpost in Hebron, and, when she refused to sign the terms of her release, Ben-Gvir showed up to cheer her on in court. They were married the next year. He told her, “I can’t promise you flowers and roses, but arrests, protests, and press.” In the Ynet interview, published a month after their wedding, Ayala was asked what she foresaw in the coming year. She replied, “I wish that, God willing, next year the land of Israel will all be ours. That we will continue to conquer it—and I mean the two banks of Jordan and south Lebanon. That we will get rid of the Arabs and deport them, at long last. That whoever needs to get the death penalty there, will.”

The Ben-Gvirs moved to Kiryat Arba, where they found a house at the settlement’s disputed fringe: an area of old Hebron that Israel kept under military control. Some eight hundred Jewish settlers live there, guarded by more than six hundred soldiers, twenty-two checkpoints, and a barbed-wire fence. With a history of stabbings by Palestinians and drive-by shootings along the nearby highway, it is among the most dangerous places in the West Bank. Yet when Ben-Gvir drives around the neighborhood he keeps the windows open—“to make it clear to them who the landlord is,” he once told an interviewer.

About two hundred and twenty thousand Palestinians live next door, in an area of Hebron controlled by the Palestinian Authority. But in Ben-Gvir’s part of town Palestinians are forbidden to drive on many of the roads, and are barred from even walking on streets that are designated “sterile.” When I visited the area recently, a poster at the entrance to the Cave of the Patriarchs announced, “It’s Ben-Gvir Time.” I was walking with a Palestinian activist named Issa Amro when an Israeli soldier warned him not to tread on the path reserved for Jews. Finally, the soldier allowed me to join Amro on the Palestinian side, which was unpaved and strewn with garbage. When people talk about Israel being an apartheid state, it’s this kind of image that comes to mind. The reality is that Hebron is an outlier even by the standards of the Israeli occupation: it is the only Palestinian city with a Jewish settlement at its center. The concern among opponents of the new government is that Ben-Gvir and other ultranationalists will bring about what Amro calls the “Hebronization” of the country at large.

Amro is forty-two, a lifelong resident of Hebron. When he was a child, the city’s main thoroughfare, al-Shuhada Street, was so bustling with shoppers that “my father had to hold my arm when we crossed.” Now our footsteps echoed as we walked down the middle of the street. After the Goldstein massacre, in 1994, twelve hundred Palestinian-owned shops and market stands along al-Shuhada and the nearby streets were shuttered, by military order. For weeks afterward, the air reeked of fruit and vegetables left behind by the merchants. Things have been desolate ever since. Hostilities toward the Palestinians used to stem mostly from the settlers, Amro said. But since the last election Israeli soldiers and police officers have been increasingly aggressive. Ten days before my visit, two soldiers stopped a group of Israeli peace activists who were touring the area. One of the soldiers tackled an activist, punched him in the face, and cocked his firearm against the man’s back. Amro was there, and filmed the incident. “Ben-Gvir will tidy up this place,” the other soldier told him. “You’re screwed.” (Last week, a soldier confronted Amro as he talked with two foreign journalists, and ordered him to delete a video of their exchange. When Amro declined, the soldier grabbed him by the throat, threw him to the ground, and kicked him.)

In December, Ben-Gvir proposed a bill that would give soldiers immunity from prosecution. Not long before, he had waved a pistol at rioters in Jerusalem who hurled stones near him. He told soldiers at the scene, “If they throw stones, shoot them.”

Netanyahu has little tolerance for lawmakers who are seen as insufficiently loyal, but Ben-Gvir treats him with deference. “Ben-Gvir admires him for real,” Crombie, the former campaign strategist, told me. Last summer, Netanyahu summoned members of the hard right to an informal summit in Caesarea, where he lives. While four of Ben-Gvir’s children splashed around in the pool, Netanyahu hashed out the terms of an alliance between Ben-Gvir and the leader of Religious Zionism, a settler named Bezalel Smotrich. The two men “were supposed to be the winning team of the right-of-the-right camp,” Crombie said. Smotrich—who calls for the annexation of the West Bank and who once said that maternity wards in Israel should be segregated—attracted kippah-wearing Ashkenazi businessmen in the suburbs and the settlements. Ben-Gvir appealed to observant voters in Israel’s development towns and mixed cities.

But the alliance was only a tactical one, and soon after the election the two parties split. The problem, reportedly, was ego: Smotrich demanded to be the alliance’s official leader; Ben-Gvir felt condescended to. Crombie, who is friendly with both men, said that Smotrich had spent years positioning himself as the new élite of an educated, unapologetic religious-nationalist camp, and “didn’t know what hit him” when Ben-Gvir’s popularity began to rise. Smotrich represented the settler contingency, a highly organized electoral bloc. He felt, Crombie said, that Ben-Gvir dragged him to the fringes of society. (Imagine a union of the Tea Party and the Proud Boys.) According to data from the Israel Democracy Institute, collected shortly after the election, seventy-eight per cent of the alliance’s voters said that they preferred Ben-Gvir to Smotrich. Netanyahu might have felt the same. Yossi Verter, a columnist for Haaretz, wrote in November that Netanyahu had less to worry about with Ben-Gvir, the “pyromaniac,” than with Smotrich, the “megalomaniac.” (A U.S. official said that the Biden Administration was “not engaging” with Ben-Gvir, hoping that Netanyahu could manage him.)

On a popular sketch-comedy show, Ben-Gvir is presented as an amiable klutz. “You have two options with extremists like him,” Omri Marcus, a former writer for the show, told me. “Present him as a Teddy bear, or as a super-scary fanatic.” The decision was clear: Ben-Gvir was the Teddy bear; Smotrich, the fanatic. Kariv, who tracked both men’s activities during the early two-thousands, broadly agreed with that depiction. He posited an index of threats, borrowed from one maintained by the Shin Bet department that handles “non-Arab terrorism,” in which such acts as damaging holy sites and mounting terror attacks on Palestinians are at the top of a scale from one to ten. By that measure, he said, Ben-Gvir was a three. Smotrich? A seven.

In 2005, following years of deadly attacks by Palestinian militants in Gaza, the government of Ariel Sharon, an otherwise hawkish Prime Minister, unilaterally pulled out of the Gaza Strip. For Jewish settlers, who believe in Israel’s divine right to rule from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, the move was a calamity. Yet most responded to the evacuation of settlements with little violence. “The big debate then among the rabbis was whether to be removed like a sack of potatoes or like a bag of fish—kicking and squirming,” Kariv said. Still, according to security officials, a small cell of hard-core settlers plotted acts of sedition. Smotrich allegedly belonged to that cell.

That August, Kariv led an operation in which special forces arrested Smotrich, along with four other suspects, in a house near Petah Tikva. “They had jerricans full of gasoline and burned oil from nearby garages,” Kariv told me. He wouldn’t specify what their plan had been, but Yitzhak Ilan, who had overseen the interrogation of Smotrich, said in 2019 that the group intended to torch cars along a Tel Aviv highway. (Smotrich, who declined to be interviewed for this article, denies the allegations; a spokesman said that he was arrested for organizing a demonstration and for blocking roads, and was released without charges. Ilan died in 2020.) In the end, the Shin Bet chose not to bring the case to court, for fear of exposing the agency’s intelligence-gathering methods.

Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir tried to join the settlers of Gaza before the evacuation. But, according to Sade, who was part of his entourage for the trip, the settlers considered the Kahanists rabble-rousers and agitators. “They turned the sprinklers on us,” he said. As the evacuation became imminent, the group, which included Ben-Gvir, his wife, and Bentzi Gopstein, took over an abandoned Jewish-owned hotel on the Gazan shore, and squatted there for several months. By the empty pool, they spray-painted “Death to the Arabs.” In the coming weeks, they were joined by sympathizers, until there were a hundred and fifty squatters clustered around the hotel. Finally, the police raided the building, in a sprawling operation that involved six hundred officers. Ben-Gvir and Ayala were nowhere to be found, according to Sade. “They had gone shopping two hours earlier,” he told me. It wasn’t the only time that Ben-Gvir disappeared at a critical juncture, he said. In his view, this raised the possibility that Ben-Gvir had coöperated with the Shin Bet, and been tipped off about the raid.

“How’s everybody doing tonight on a scale of zero to ten, with ten being the worst you’ve ever felt?”
Cartoon by Ed Himelblau and Shannon Odell

For years, Ben-Gvir has denied rumors about collaborating with the Shin Bet. In a Knesset session in 1999, regarding the activities of Shin Bet agents, a right-wing legislator named Benny Elon read aloud from the commission’s interview with Yigal Amir, Rabin’s assassin, in which Amir mentions that Ben-Gvir was said to want to kill Rabin himself. Elon sought reassurance from the state that the Shin Bet was not deploying “provocateur agents.”

After Rabin’s murder, the Shin Bet revealed that it had deployed at least one agent among the far right: Avishai Raviv, who went by the code name Champagne. In 2019, the former defense minister Avigdor Liberman spoke in a radio interview about Ben-Gvir’s party. Liberman, a right-winger who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union, mused, “Is Itamar Ben-Gvir what he presents himself to be, or a kind of new Champagne?” He concluded, “I’m not sure at all.” Ben-Gvir promptly sued him, saying, “If I’m a Shabak agent, then Liberman’s a K.G.B. agent.” (Liberman claimed parliamentary immunity.)

I asked Kariv whether the rumors about Ben-Gvir’s involvement with the Shin Bet had any merit. “Even off the record, I wouldn’t tell you if it was or wasn’t true,” he said.

I mentioned Liberman’s radio interview, and noted, “A defense minister insinuated this.”

“And the wife of a Prime Minister,” Kariv volunteered.

In 2020, while Naftali Bennett was serving as defense minister, his wife, Gilat, wrote on Facebook that her home had been broken into, and claimed that Jewish Power activists were responsible. Ben-Gvir sued her for libel. Four months later, she issued a detailed statement, in which she wrote, “Although Ben-Gvir presents a veneer of a right-wing extremist . . . he had served for many years as an agent for the Shin Bet, with the goal of gathering information on extreme right-wing activists and besmirching the rightist camp with provocations.” Bennett did not disclose how she got that information. (Her family declined to comment for this article.) A month later, she and Ben-Gvir reached an out-of-court settlement, and she issued a formal apology, withdrawing her claims.

In 2015, Ben-Gvir, dressed in white, attended a wedding in Jerusalem for a young couple in his circle. After the ceremony, the music came on, and the men broke into an ecstatic dance, holding aloft not only the groom but also knives, assault rifles, and what appeared to be a Molotov cocktail, passing them from hand to hand. One of the guests then raised a picture of a baby, while another repeatedly stabbed the picture with a knife. The baby’s name was Ali Dawabsheh.

Five months earlier, in the West Bank village of Duma, Jewish arsonists had firebombed a Palestinian home, burning baby Ali and his parents to death and critically injuring his four-year-old brother. Many at the wedding were friendly with the main arsonist, who had since been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Ben-Gvir was his attorney. (Though Ben-Gvir can be seen smiling in a video from the wedding, he has maintained that he did not witness the display of weapons or the picture of the baby, which he called “stupidity.”)

Before Ben-Gvir entered parliament, in 2021, he was Israel’s leading attorney for suspected Jewish terrorists, settlers, and the far right. “Literally the devil’s advocate,” one legal observer told me. It’s highly unusual in Israel for a man with fifty-odd indictments to practice law, and Ben-Gvir secured his license only after a two-year battle with the Israel Bar Association. Among those who resisted certifying him was Yori Geiron, then the chair of the bar. Geiron told me, “We would hope that the Bar Association would not populate its ranks with a person who has a criminal record, let alone one who has not been rehabilitated.”

Yet even Ben-Gvir’s critics concede that he is a talented litigator. Not long after he began practicing, he defended a Jewish settler charged with attacking a Palestinian man in Hebron. In court, Ben-Gvir asked the main witness for the prosecution to confirm that the person in the defendant’s box was the suspect. The witness did—and then Ben-Gvir revealed that he had secretly swapped out his client for another man. The judge dismissed the case.

As his legal reputation grew, Ben-Gvir managed to distance himself from the innermost circle of extremism. Still, he didn’t seem to soften his views. “My style is different,” he reportedly said in 2016, “but ideologically I haven’t changed.”

“I don’t recall Ben-Gvir ever arguing that it was wrong to hurt an innocent Palestinian,” a man named Dov Morell told me. Morell, who is twenty-eight, was a guest at the “wedding of hate,” as the event became known in Israel. It was he who had held up the picture of baby Ali. “I look back on it now and I’m horrified,” he said when I met him recently on the campus of Tel Aviv University, where he is a law student. He was easy to spot amid a throng of young people: a thickset man with a ginger beard and a large knit skullcap.

After footage from the wedding leaked to the Israeli press, in 2015, Morell’s parents sent him to stay with relatives in Wisconsin and New Jersey. There, he told me, he was exposed to libertarian and feminist Facebook groups, and slowly underwent a reckoning. He is now active with the left-wing political party Meretz. He sounded genuine in his attempt to recall his mind-set at the time. “One of my idols was Himmler,” Morell told me. “Shocking, I know. But when you read his diaries you see a man grappling with the horrible things the Nazis were doing, yet still believing in the race theory. I really identified with that. I knew that what I was doing was harmful, but I thought that it was right.” (Later, Morell learned that the diaries had been heavily rewritten.)

Last April, Morell was convicted of incitement to terrorism, as were six other wedding participants, including the groom. Though he is now “firmly in the left,” as he put it, he still supports the movement to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount—which they are currently prohibited from doing, so that Muslims can worship at the al-Aqsa mosque, on the same site, without risking violent confrontations. As part of his religious activism, Morell came to know Ayala Ben-Gvir. He described her and Ben-Gvir as “amazing people who want to do terrible things.” Those on the far right did not consider themselves extremists, Morell said: “When you believe that the world came with manufacturer’s instructions, then you have to follow those instructions.”

In the spring of 2021, a month after Ben-Gvir joined parliament, his allegiances as a politician were tested for the first time. In the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Palestinian residents were engaged in a five-decade legal battle to keep their homes, which sit on land that has been claimed by settlers. That May, Israel’s Supreme Court was expected to issue a decisive ruling. Fearing expulsion, the residents erupted in nightly protests. After a week of unrest, Ben-Gvir showed up. He set up a desk for himself, planted the Israeli flag, and hung a massive sign that declared the spot “The Bureau of Knesset Member Ben-Gvir.” The goal, he said, was to provide security for the handful of Jewish families living there. Instead, his presence provoked more violence. Palestinian residents threw chairs and rocks; Jewish residents responded in kind. That night, Ben-Gvir reportedly received a call from Netanyahu’s office, warning, “If you don’t leave, it could end with Hamas firing rockets on Israel.”

Netanyahu was right. The clashes spilled into other parts of the Old City, including the grounds of the al-Aqsa mosque, which the Israeli police then raided. That night, Hamas launched rockets at Jerusalem. Israel sent devastating air strikes into Gaza. For Ben-Gvir’s supporters, though, that was just the beginning. In messages on WhatsApp and Telegram, they promoted violent demonstrations in Israel’s mixed towns. Ben-Gvir’s ally Gopstein wrote, “Good Jews, we’re arranging a protest in Bat Yam on the promenade at 5 P.M.” That protest ended in the attempted lynching of an Arab man. The following day, Israel’s police chief made a stunningly direct statement in a closed briefing: “The person responsible for this intifada is Itamar Ben-Gvir. . . . The police don’t have the tools to deal with him.”

The uprising brought to the fore a term that Ben-Gvir favors: meshilut, or governance. In interviews, he spoke about women who were afraid to walk down the streets, and railed against the torching of Jewish farms. While Netanyahu talked about the cost of living, Ben-Gvir concentrated on the anxieties and prejudices of Israelis who complained that their daughters were unable to visit the mall for fear of being harassed. Soon, citizens worried about law-and-order issues began to see him as a viable alternative to the establishment. His support spiked even in Israel’s kibbutzim, long seen as leftist strongholds. The effect only grew as Palestinian militants carried out a surge of killings last year.

The campaign for meshilut worked. In a poll conducted by Israel’s public broadcaster before the recent election, eighty-four per cent of voters said that they were “unconcerned” about Ben-Gvir’s connection to Kahane. For his detractors on the left, however, “governance” was code for a majority wielding power in any way it saw fit. “His goal is the allocation of police resources by a nationalist index . . . and not by any index related to crime,” Chaim Levinson wrote in Haaretz. According to Ben-Gvir, “a Bedouin man who rapes a young girl is several times worse than any other man who rapes a young girl,” Levinson went on. “That is his whole theory.”

Ben-Gvir’s tough-on-crime persona was perhaps most resonant with the fans of his home soccer team, Beitar Jerusalem. Beitar has a long history of racism. In 2013, the team brought two Muslim players from Chechnya. In response, two men reportedly connected to a fan club called La Familia set fire to the team’s offices and trophy room. La Familia can be hard to distinguish from a gang. In 2016, an undercover police operation led to the arrest of fifty-two members, on suspicion of aggravated violence and operating a weapons trade.

Ben-Gvir’s affiliation with the club dates back to his teen years, and he is often seen wearing the team’s black-and-yellow scarf. Two weeks after the election, he went to a stadium in Jerusalem to watch Beitar play Bnei Sakhnin, a club from a northern Arab town. Encounters between the teams have such a violent history that for years their fans were banned from travelling to away games whenever they squared off. Now Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator, joined the fans in the Sakhnin stands. From his seat, he watched as TikTok videos pinged on his phone, showing Ben-Gvir in the east stand, reserved for diehard Beitarists. He was smiling for selfies with spectators, while a chant reverberated through the stadium: “Ahmed Tibi is dead!” Tibi has been a member of the Knesset for twenty-three years, and has served as its deputy chairman. In 2021, Ben-Gvir, in one of his first speeches before parliament, refused to acknowledge him with the customary “sir.” Tibi called him to order.

“It’s a game where we roll the dice to see which destination wedding we should spend our savings on this year.”
Cartoon by Anjali Chandrashekar

Ben-Gvir shouted at him, “Who are you? You’re a terrorist! You belong in the parliament of Syria, not here!”

“Rude! Bully! Get him out of here!” Tibi snapped back, as security guards tried to remove Ben-Gvir, who clung to the lectern.

In January, I met Tibi in his Knesset office. He spoke softly, but his voice rose when Ben-Gvir’s name came up. “Cheap manipulator,” he called him. He wished to make clear that his animosity didn’t stem from religious differences. Tibi has what’s known in Israeli politics as a “minority alliance” with ultra-Orthodox legislators. It’s common to see political rivals in the Knesset exchange a friendly word in the cafeteria or in the halls. But with Ben-Gvir, Tibi said, “there’s genuine hatred there.”

Tibi’s party had belonged to an alliance that had been in the opposition during the last government, which became known as the “change” coalition. His alliance helped precipitate the dissolution of the government and, by extension, sped the return of Netanyahu. I asked Tibi whether he felt partly responsible for the latest election results. He brushed off the question. “More Palestinians were killed under the ‘change’ government than under the previous government,” he said. For Tibi, two issues were now of utmost concern. The first was Ben-Gvir’s recent attempts to worsen the living conditions of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The second was the status of the al-Aqsa mosque. In 2000, Ariel Sharon, as the head of the opposition, entered the holy compound, helping to spark the second Palestinian intifada. Tibi was worried that a third intifada was not far off. If the new government attempted to change the fragile security arrangements that have governed the site since 1967, Tibi warned, “that can light up the region.”

The new Israeli government was sworn in amid escalating violence, as a spate of attacks by Palestinians led to Israeli military raids across the occupied West Bank. The raids continued into the New Year, when Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians, who the Army said were militants, and an elderly woman inside the refugee camp of Jenin. Almog Cohen, the Jewish Power lawmaker, tweeted a flexed-biceps emoji and a note of encouragement: “Keep killing them.”

Soon afterward, a Palestinian gunman fatally shot seven Jewish Israelis outside a synagogue in Jerusalem, before police killed him. Ben-Gvir, newly installed as the national-security minister, arrived at the scene that night, wearing a white dress shirt and a blazer. “Deal with them, Itamar—we voted for you!” a man shouted through tears. Embracing witnesses, Ben-Gvir repeated three times that he had left his family’s “Shabbat table” to be there. He seemed to want to be thanked. Without his usual scapegoats—Bennett, leftist ministers, Tibi, the liberal press, the U.N.—he also seemed at a loss for words.

Within twenty-four hours of the shooting, though, Ben-Gvir had settled on a culprit: Israel’s attorney general. He told reporters that she had not acted swiftly enough to authorize sealing the home of the terrorist, which some security officials consider a deterrent to other potential attackers. Ayala Ben-Gvir wrote an op-ed for a news site for the settler community, complaining that, while her husband was “working harder than I ever thought possible,” the government’s legal advisers were “debating whether to drink Nespresso or espresso.”

Ben-Gvir’s predecessor, from the Labor Party, had worked to limit gun access. Ben-Gvir now said that he would expedite gun licenses for Israeli citizens. The previous coalition had also launched a five-year program that allocated roughly ten billion dollars to Israel’s Arab communities, which had sustained years of government neglect. Ben-Gvir’s party suggested that it would work to scrap the program, stating, without evidence, that a “vast sum” of the money had gone toward funding terrorism and crime. But Ben-Gvir offered little in the way of policy. Instead, he homed in, as is his habit, on symbols: he shut down Palestinian prisoners’ pita ovens (which were in operation because bread-delivery vans had been used to smuggle in contraband), then posted a video on TikTok of himself enjoying a tray of fresh pita. After the synagogue shooting, he also ordered Palestinian prisoners to be put in solitary confinement. In response, militants in Gaza fired rockets into Israel with messages for the prisoners inscribed on them.

The overhaul of the judiciary only sharpened the country’s divisions. It will, among other things, give the Knesset the ability to override Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority, and allow the government to control a committee that appoints judges. “The concern is unrestrained political majorities doing whatever they want,” Adam Shinar, a professor of constitutional law at Reichman University, told me. “And, of course, who’s going to be the victim? Probably Palestinians, women generally, asylum seekers, Israeli Palestinian citizens, L.G.B.T.Q., religious minorities, Reform, Conservative.” In other words, Shinar said, groups without much of a lobby in the Knesset, whose only redress is through the court system. I mentioned that liberals had raised such concerns in the past, and asked whether it was possible that they were crying wolf. “What people forget about that parable is that the wolf does come in the end,” Shinar said.

Increasingly, criticism comes from the right as well. Netanyahu’s former attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, said in an interview that the reform is “the most dangerous thing that can be.” A poll released by Channel 12 showed that sixty-two per cent of Israelis wanted to stop or delay the reform, while only twenty-four per cent wanted it to move forward. In a speech on February 12th, the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, warned, “We are on the verge of constitutional and social collapse.” The following day, a hundred thousand protesters marched on the Knesset, chanting “Democracy!” Inside, a legislative committee controlled by the government passed the first of the overhaul’s proposals.

Amid the unrest, a letter recently landed on Ben-Gvir’s desk. Written by Raphael Morris, the Temple Mount activist, it pleaded with Ben-Gvir to allow Jews to ascend the holy site on Passover and offer a sacrificial lamb. The ritual, practiced in ancient times, is considered so extreme that only a few denominations permit it. Addressing Ben-Gvir, the letter notes that the ritual’s “significance is well known to you from your past activism.” Morris told me that he was unsure how Ben-Gvir would respond. Dov Morell, who had also advocated the issue, was adamant that Ben-Gvir, under pressure to conform to governmental norms, “will never authorize it.”

Others in Israel subscribe to this view. Rino Zror, the journalist who covers the far right, pointed me to a briefing that Ben-Gvir gave after two bombs went off in Jerusalem, killing one person and injuring about twenty. Ben-Gvir, discussing the attacks, made a distinction between “little Israel” and “Judea and Samaria,” the Biblical term for the West Bank. It was a glancing reference but, Zror said, one that the “old Ben-Gvir” wouldn’t have made. Some Arab leaders, too, were willing to withhold judgment. “Maybe he will do things other people didn’t do,” Fayez Abu Sehiban, the mayor of Rahat, a predominantly Bedouin city in the Negev, said in a television interview after the election.

In Ben-Gvir’s short time in office, though, he seems mostly to be chafing at the limits of his position. In a transition ceremony on New Year’s Day, he referred to his predecessor as “undoubtedly the most failed minister.” At midnight on January 3rd, he made a trip to the mikvah, or ritual bath. At seven the next morning, surrounded by security and police, he walked up the Temple Mount. His visit, which lasted thirteen minutes, was swiftly condemned by the Arab world, the U.S., and Turkey. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry called it a “flagrant assault.” Netanyahu himself had issued a similar warning in 2020, saying that disturbing the status quo at the site could “unleash a billion Muslims on us.” But Ben-Gvir maintained that he’d secured the Prime Minister’s approval before making the trip. The Temple Mount is “open to everyone,” he said in a video. “Muslims and Christians come here, and, yes, Jews, too.” Staring into the camera while walking through the compound, he added, “In a government in which I’m a member, there will be no racist discrimination.” ♦

An earlier version of this article mischaracterized players hired by Beitar Jerusalem in 2013.