Dingy, funny, vulgar, shirt collar and white kippah crooked, sweat on his forehead, unshaven, unstyled, he rages, grins, his eyes constantly looking for the camera lens. Itamar Ben Gvir is a spectacle. There is no lack of humor. He’s violent. He is homophobic, anti-liberal and anti-democratic and believes in the supremacy of divine law and the Jewish people. He believes in revenge – first against Arabs, then against non-Jews. Convicted in 2007 of inciting hatred and supporting a terrorist organization, he now heads Israel’s third political force. His Religious Zionism list won 14 out of 120 seats in Parliament, 10% of the vote.
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In parliamentary elections on Tuesday, November 1, he offered former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing “bloc” a majority that had eluded it since 2019, according to an official ballot count that is slow to complete (90% , Thursday morning), but the trend seems irreversible.
In government, he claims the Ministry of Public Security. As the savior of the Israeli right, he is in many ways its driving force. “His Jewish supremacy is at the center of the right today, not on the fringes. It crosses Netanyahu’s Likud, whose ideology has become deadened,” says left-wing philosopher Assaf Sharon, who grew up in a religious colony. This provokes an examination of conscience in Israel: what is Jewish fascism? How did the “Jewish and democratic state” come about?
Itamar Ben Gvir was born in Mevasseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem, to a father from Iraqi Kurdistan into a middle-class family and took to the streets as a teenager in the early 1990s, the militants of Rabbi Meir Kahane. This American extremist, who got into trouble with his country’s judiciary, was elected to the Knesset in 1984. At the beginning of the first intifada in December 1987, he was forbidden to represent himself. His Kach party was banned and then declared a terrorist organization – like the Jewish Defense League in the United States.
A hero in his neighborhood
In this universe, Mr. Ben Gvir finds family “and much love for the Jewish people.” When Baroukh Goldstein murdered twenty-nine Palestinians at the tomb of the Hebron Patriarchs in 1994, he was celebrating a hero. Until last year, his portrait hung in his home under this verse from the Bible (Numbers 25:13): “Because he was moved by a jealous ardor for his God, and performed the rite of atonement for the children of Israel,” which included a eulogy complete the zealot Phinehas.
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