It was Friday, Nov. 25, in Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. A group of Israeli Jews, from a left-wing, Orthodox group called Children of Abraham, had come to show solidarity with local Palestinian families who had borne the brunt of violence by Israeli settlers and their supporters a week earlier. On the way back to their bus, as one activist recounted to me, they happened on some Israeli soldiers dancing in the street with a group of pro-settler visitors.
One of the left-wing activists criticized the soldiers for the political display. An argument escalated. Then, as someone pulled out a phone and began to film, a soldier grabbed an activist, hurled him to the ground, and slammed a fist into his cheek, hard enough to break a bone.
In a second clip from the confrontation, another soldier smugly addresses an activist’s camera. Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the extreme right Jewish Power party, “is going to impose order here”, he announces. “That’s it ... everything you [leftists] do here is over”.
“Am I doing anything against the law?” the activist demands.
“I decide what the law is”, the soldier answers, “and you're breaking the law”.
In part, the soldier was celebrating Ben-Gvir’s electoral success last month: Running as part of a far-right alliance, Jewish Power won six seats in Israel’s 120-member parliament. Perhaps the soldier had also seen that morning’s news: That Friday, a week ago, Ben-Gvir had just reached a coalition deal with once and future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ben-Gvir — a disciple of the late, not-to-be-lamented racist politician and provocateur Meir Kahane — will head the ministry responsible for the country’s police, now to be called the National Security Ministry. Several other enforcement agencies will be moved from other ministries to his: one that deals with planning and building law, another that protects national parkland, a third that enforces environmental law. Units of the Border Police — a paramilitary force responsible for public order — that are deployed in the occupied West Bank will be put under Ben-Gvir’s command rather than the army’s.
But the Hebron incident shows that bringing Ben-Gvir into government entails risks that go far beyond his formal powers.
Possibly spurred by the viral spread of the Hebron videos, the army responded quickly to restore discipline. Both of the soldiers were suspended from duty. While military police investigated the one who had assaulted an activist, the soldier who had trumpeted Ben-Gvir’s new order was court-martialed by his brigade commander and sentenced to 10 days in a military prison.
Yet Ben-Gvir immediately blasted the army command, saying that the punishment “crossed a red line” and showed a failure to stand up for soldiers. Several Knesset members from Netanyahu’s Likud party echoed him — including former minister Miri Regev, who is likely to return to the cabinet. The brigade commander reportedly received threatening phone calls and came under attack on social media.
In no time, the Hebron incident had morphed into an open conflict between the newly empowered radical right and the Israeli military leadership, with its traditional commitment — however inconsistently followed — to ethical restraints and an apolitical stance. As Children of Abraham activist Mikhael Manekin, himself a former officer, told me, “I’m against the occupation. But I understand the importance of a functioning military”. He warned about the risks of encouraging what he called “anarchist” behavior among soldiers.
The formal powers promised to Ben-Gvir make matters worse. Responding to those promises, including the transfer of authority over Border Police units, outgoing Defense Minister Benny Gantz accurately said that they meant “creating a private army for Ben-Gvir” in the West Bank. The potential for Ben-Gvir to ignite a conflagration in occupied territory is immense.
And, for that matter, inside Israel. Efforts to reduce the high crime rate in the Arab community within Israel have been a top priority for both Arab leaders and the outgoing government. Thabet Abu Rass, co-executive director of the Abraham Initiatives, an NGO that promotes Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel, says that the outgoing minister and deputy minister responsible for the police worked hard to build trust with the Arab community in order to address precisely that issue. But, he told me, “Ben-Gvir has been inciting against Arabs” — and treats the civil problem of crime as one of national conflict. Trust will vanish.
The additional authorities Ben-Gvir demanded and received point to his incendiary intentions: They all deal with land use. Arab localities in general, and the Bedouin population in the Negev desert in particular, “have suffered from years of discrimination in the planning realm”, as Efrat Cohen Bar, co-head of Bimkom–Planners for Planning Rights, emailed me. Arab citizens have had little choice but to build without permits. Home demolitions “in the name of the dry letter of the law” have caused suffering for years, she says. “Giving expanded authority to a racist and nationalist” is likely to lead to greater destruction.
Netanyahu is not a stupid man. He understands that undermining military discipline endangers the state itself. He knows that Ben-Gvir is a political pyromaniac. But Netanyahu is desperate — to return to power and to use power to end the criminal case that could put him in prison. To that end, he’s willing to hand the pyromaniac matches and gasoline.
Gershom Gorenberg is an Israeli historian and journalist. He is the author of, most recently, “War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East”. He is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and has written for The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine, among others.