GIVAT LAHAVA, West Bank — When Tzvi Succot moved to this rocky hilltop outpost near the Palestinian city of Nablus in 2005, he had a clear mission: to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state. Israel had unilaterally withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, and Succot felt betrayed by his government.
So he led his neighbors on a reign of terror through Palestinian villages — torching homes, mosques, cars and olive groves. They got into fights with Palestinian landowners and faced off against Israeli security forces. But in every confrontation, he said, they felt confident knowing they had a brilliant, fiercely dedicated advocate in their corner — the attorney Itamar Ben Gvir, now Israel’s national security minister.
“Itamar is a very talented lawyer,” said Succot, 32, now a father of five and a lawmaker from Religious Zionism, Israel’s third-largest political bloc. “And he understood something about Israel, which more Israelis are only now beginning to realize, that there’s a very serious problem here with governance. That we can’t allow this monster to flourish and grow.”
Ben Gvir, 46, now occupies a position of immense power in the same system he has spent his life defying. His political rise is inextricably linked to the violent vigilante settler movement, and to his own rap sheet of anti-Arab provocations, which have inflamed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and won him a devoted following.
His ultranationalist Jewish Power party has called for the expulsion of “disloyal” Palestinians, the annexation of the West Bank — the land Palestinians envision as part of their future state — and for “revenge” against anyone who stands in its way. Until last year, it was a fringe movement, repeatedly failing to muster enough votes to enter the Knesset.
But in November, Benjamin Netanyahu, facing potential jail time in a corruption trial and running out of options, won a fifth term as prime minister by orchestrating an alliance between Ben Gvir and another far-right politician, Bezalel Smotrich. Ben Gvir was named minister of national security, with an expanded portfolio that gives him unprecedented control over Israeli police, a flash-point Jerusalem holy site and security forces that operate in the occupied West Bank.
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“A violent criminal who was convicted of supporting terrorism and didn’t serve a single day in the army, isn’t going to send our children into battle,” opposition leader Yair Lapid said at an anti-government rally in December, referring to the Israeli army’s rejection of Ben Gvir from mandatory service. His extremist activism made the future security minister a security risk, the army decided.
Ben Gvir refused to be interviewed for this story, a departure from the camera-ready image he cultivated during his campaign. He was the third-most-interviewed politician in Israeli media in the run-up to the election, according to the Israeli research firm Ifat. The “big difference” between his movement and that of Meir Kahane, the terrorist who once inspired him, Ben Gvir said in 2021, is that “they give us a microphone.”
Ben Gvir got his first 15 minutes of infamy as a teenager in 1995 when he stole the Cadillac ornament off the car of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “Just as we got to his car, we’ll get to him too,” he said into a camera. Weeks later, Rabin was assassinated by a messianic anarchist who accused him of “treason” for signing a landmark peace deal with the Palestinians. Ben Gvir was not connected to the killing, though he campaigned for the assassin’s release from prison.
Ben Gvir now resides in a settlement near the fiercely contested biblical city of Hebron. Like many Israelis living deep inside the West Bank, he was not born there.
Continued @ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/15/israel-ben-gvir-netanyahu-government/
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