Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's National Security Minister, has sparked global outrage with his controversial actions and statements, challenging the country's public image. His behavior has led to criticism from both international allies and domestic officials, prompting concerns about Israel's values and norms.
Key points
Itamar Ben-Gvir is Israel's National Security Minister.
His actions have drawn global outrage and criticism.
Netanyahu acknowledged the damage to Israel's public image.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar condemned Ben-Gvir's behavior.
In recent weeks, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has shown the world a version of “modern Israel” it had preferred not to see.
From telling the press that he would “not allow” a United States ceasefire deal with Iran that was bad for Israel to his televised harassment of bound activists of the Global Sumud Flotilla, Ben-Gvir’s actions have drawn outrage on a global stage.
It had been convenient to cast the far-right leader of the Jewish Power party as a political outlier within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. This allowed domestic critics of the far-right factions in Israel to continue supporting the government, and companies and countries outside to continue trade despite growing condemnations of the Israeli government.
After public rebukes of Ben-Gvir’s taunting of the predominantly European activists by the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada – and even Israel’s foremost allies in the US – Netanyahu understood the deep damage this was doing to Israel’s public relations image, and described the spectacle as “not in line with Israel’s values and norms”.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar went further, releasing a statement accusing his fellow cabinet minister of knowingly causing harm to the state of Israel and claiming that Ben-Gvir was “not the face of Israel”.
It is a sentiment echoed by many Israeli media outlets, eager to separate the minister from the Israeli state and government, yet it appears evident that the opposite is true, and Ben-Gvir is the face of an increasingly dominant section of Israeli society.
“He’s stupid, which tells us he’s not acting on his own,” Knesset member Aida Touma-Sliman of the left-wing Hadash party told Al Jazeera. “Everything he’s doing he’s doing with the help of other politicians and civil servants who share his beliefs. He wouldn’t be able to do what he does if they weren’t helping him.”
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“If just one policeman said no, you can’t politicise the police force, that would be it,” said Touma-Sliman. “If the head of the prison service said no, you can’t starve, torture and sexually abuse prisoners, they wouldn’t, and that would be it.”
Forged in division
Ben-Gvir was hardly an unknown quantity when he entered government in 2022. His first brush with national prominence came in 1995, after Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to the Oslo Accords, a series of agreements with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which the world hoped was a path towards a two-state solution.
At the time, grinning to the camera, a 19-year-old Ben-Gvir was filmed brandishing the Cadillac hood ornament from Rabin’s car, declaring to the cameras: “We got to his car, we’ll get to him, too.”
Rabin was assassinated just weeks later by right-wing extremist and ultranationalist Yigal Amir.
Born in a small suburb west of Jerusalem in 1976, Ben-Gvir claimed to the news site Mako in 2021 that he became religious at 12 and radicalised at 14 due to what he claimed was the violence of the First Intifada.
His teacher recalled that Ben-Gvir, like many other high school students at the time, was openly supportive of the extremist Kach party, founded by the American-Israeli rabbi Meir Kahane.
Kach was banned in 1988, after judges found that the party breached constitutional reforms implemented that year.
Goldstein became something of a motif for Ben-Gvir, who reportedly took his future wife to the killer’s grave on their first date. Later, he dressed as the murderer for the Jewish holiday of Purim and displayed Goldstein’s portrait in his home until removing it on the advice of campaign strategists in 2021.
Indicted for his activities on 53 occasions, Ben-Gvir later boasted to Haaretz that following his success in having a majority dismissed, the judges in his trials recommended he study law.
However, in 2007, two indictments resulted in convictions for incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organisation, after Ben-Gvir was arrested brandishing signs reading, “Expel the Arab enemy,” and “Rabbi Kahane was right: The Arab MKs are a fifth column,” referring to Arab members of the Israeli Knesset.
Ben-Gvir at Al-Aqsa
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir visits the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound during Jerusalem Day, in Jerusalem’s Old City, on May 26, 2025 [Ammar Awad/Reuters]
Ben-Gvir qualified as a lawyer in defiance of the Israeli Bar Association in 2012, which had tried to bar him due to his past convictions and became known for defending far-right settlers and hardliners.
In 2015, those far-right connections again threatened to derail his political ambitions when he was photographed at the wedding of Amiram Ben-Uliel, a settler convicted of killing a one-year-old baby and his parents when he firebombed their home in the occupied West Bank village of Duma.
At the wedding, guests were filmed dancing with knives, assault rifles and a Molotov cocktail, while one repeatedly stabbed an image of the infant victim.
Ben-Gvir defended the gathering, claiming, to the disbelief of many, that “no one realised these were photos of a member of the Dawabsheh family”.
Member of the Knesset, Ofer Cassif, who had questioned Ben-Gvir’s eligibility to stand for election, gave Al Jazeera a personal account of the politician that starkly contrasts with the affable persona presented by some sections of Israeli media.
“I’ve never seen Ben-Gvir laugh or joke. He’s a bully, but the kind of schoolyard bully who shuts up as soon as the teacher raises their voice,” he said.
“Ben-Gvir is a violent man. I mean, he has convictions for supporting terrorism and had a picture of Baruch Goldstein on his wall.”
Politicised hate
In 2022, Netanyahu helped cement an alliance between Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right leader of the Religious Zionist Party, as the public turned against a broad coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.
After earlier joint runs in 2021 and 2019, they returned to the Knesset as the third-largest faction, maintaining Netanyahu’s coalition and, according to analysts, acting as public faces for the more extremist aspects of its right-wing ideology.
He has boasted on social media of worsening the already harrowing conditions of Palestinian detainees, many held without charge, while defending the rape and forced starvation of others.
At the same time as threatening to collapse the ruling coalition at the first sign that the genocide in Gaza might be scaled back, Ben-Gvir has also led numerous incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, in defiance of government policies.
Following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, Ben-Gvir has overseen a rapid increase in gun licences to Israeli settlers across the occupied West Bank. As predicted, there has been a spike in deadly violence against Palestinians since then.
In April, international outrage focused on footage of the minister clutching a bottle of champagne as he celebrated the passage of a bill targeting Palestinians with the death penalty.
Former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy pointed out that much of the criticism of Ben-Gvir’s haranguing Samud activists in May was about performance itself, rather than the abuse they had suffered in Israeli detention.
“To my mind, it’s the easy target. The argument being made is that the problem is Ben-Gvir going out and posting a video, rather than the way they treat the flotilla, the settlers, let alone the way they treat Palestinians,” Levy said.
“They aren’t changing their policies whatsoever. No one is questioning what they actually do in Gaza, the West Bank, the flotilla, Lebanon, etc. Instead, they’re questioning the style of one minister.”
Nevertheless, despite the international blowback, Ben-Gvir’s base appears to be holding firm, even as the star of his more sober counterpart on the extreme right, Bezalel Smotrich, appears to be fading.
Yet, Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin pointed out that, in reality, Ben-Gvir’s policy positions were rarely more extreme than many in the governing Likud party.
“[He] represents a populist far-right Jewish supremacist politics with a theatrical, provocative, circus style familiar from nationalist-populist politicians around the world,” he told Al Jazeera.
“His supporters could be secular, traditional or religious right-wingers who believe that threats from Palestinians can only be addressed through force and humiliation.”
Ben-Gvir was invited to respond to the points raised in this article but has yet to do so.
