The Two Extremists Driving Israel's Policy

The Atlantic

3 days ago

They are the leading extremists in the most right-wing government in Israel's history: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are both West Bank settlers. They ran together on the same ticket in Israel's most recent election, gaining more votes than ever before for the far right. They both want Israel to reoccupy all of Gaza, to renew Israeli settlement there, and to ' encourage ' Palestinians to emigrate. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's dependence on their support to stay in power is a key reason, possibly the main reason, that the war in Gaza continues. They are also rivals, evidence that extremism comes in more than one form.
A case in point: The Israeli army's new offensive, Smotrich declared in a May 19 video clip, 'is destroying everything left in [the Gaza] Strip, simply because it is one big city of terror.' The population, he said, would not only be concentrated in the southern end of Gaza, but would continue on, 'with God's help, to third countries'; meanwhile, the army was 'eliminating ministers, officials,' and other members of the Hamas administration. Smotrich presented all of this as proof that the government had at last adopted his approach to conducting the war. He ended with a slang term translatable roughly as 'We're kicking the enemy's face in,' and a verse from the Bible.
Smotrich's speech can be read simply as a testament to the brutality of the Israeli campaign in Gaza, and to the far right's claim of responsibility for dictating it. But Smotrich was also defending himself against criticism from Ben-Gvir, someone he describes as always trying to be 'to the right of the right.'
Smotrich supported Netanyahu's plan, presented the night before in a meeting of senior ministers, to end the total blockade on humanitarian aid to Gaza and allow in what Smotrich called 'a minimum of food and medicine.' He described this concession as essential so that Israel's allies would defend it in the United Nations Security Council and allow the war to continue. Ben-Gvir opposed the decision and, in Smotrich's account, selectively leaked bits of the debate at the meeting to the media. Israeli journalists, myself included, promptly received a flurry of anonymous text messages backing Ben-Gvir's position and blasting Smotrich's.
In other words, while Smotrich was claiming credit for getting things done, Ben-Gvir was outperforming him on the public stage. This is a starting point for understanding the difference between the two men who are driving Israel's push to the extreme.
The Leninist of the Right
When I spoke with the Brandeis University professor Yehudah Mirsky, a Jerusalem-based scholar of religious Zionism, he described Smotrich as a 'Leninist': Smotrich 'believes he has the correct philosophical understanding of history,' Mirsky told me, and thinks he's 'part of the revolutionary vanguard that is supposed to seize the reins of power.'
Smotrich's 'understanding of history' derives from the theology of a radical rabbi, Tzvi Yehudah Kook, whose teachings became fundamental to the settler movement that sprang up after 1967's Six-Day War. Kook held that the establishment of Israel was part of the process through which God was bringing final redemption to his chosen people. Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, and its conquest of the West Bank and other territory, were proof that God was fulfilling biblical prophecies.
Kook's disciples came to regard permanently holding the 'redeemed' territories conquered in 1967 as an absolute religious requirement. Their central project was establishing settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights—mostly membership-only communities of like-minded people that grew more and more separate from mainstream Israel.
Smotrich, 45, is a second-generation settler, schooled in religious institutions faithful to Kook's political theology. His public statements suggest a dedication to seeing in every circumstance a step in the 'great divine process of redemption.' That includes political setbacks: In a Knesset speech when his party was out of power in 2021, he quoted a Talmudic description of the moral decay that would precede the coming of the Messiah. This is a closed system in which nothing can serve as disproof.
Smotrich first rose to public notoriety in 2005. At the time, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, of the Likud Party, was preparing Israel for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the evacuation of its settlements there. The move was not only a political shock for religious Zionists, but also a theological earthquake. How could Israel, an instrument of God's plan, violate that plan by giving up sacred ground?
A month before the withdrawal, the Shin Bet security service and police arrested Smotrich and three other activists in an apartment east of Tel Aviv. The men were interrogated for three weeks on suspicions that included conspiring to endanger lives on the roads; then they were put under house arrest, but finally released without charges, apparently after the withdrawal.
Smotrich has asserted that he was suspected only of planning protests to block roads—as demonstrators against the current government have done regularly without being arrested. In a 2023 television interview, a former Shin Bet agent who'd arrested the activists insisted otherwise: He said that revealing what Smotrich and his associates had planned would expose Shin Bet sources—but that if they had carried out their plans, Smotrich would now 'not be a minister; he would also would not be a Knesset member.' The Shin Bet was involved, the former agent said, because its mandate is 'preventing terrorism.' Because no trial was held, neither version has been tested in court.
The affair did not impede Smotrich's ascent as a settler activist and politician. He was elected to the Knesset in 2015, representing a hard-line faction in an alliance of small religious nationalist parties. His new prominence furnished a platform for statements that shocked many Israelis with their extremity.
In 2016, Israeli news media reported that three hospitals were segregating Jewish and Arab mothers in their maternity wards. The hospitals denied the practice—but Smotrich defended it. 'It's natural that my wife wouldn't want to lie next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who might murder her baby in another 20 years,' he tweeted. After the 2021 election, Smotrich blocked Netanyahu's bid to include an Arab party in his coalition and said, 'Arabs are citizens of Israel—for now, at least.' The same year, he blamed a resurgence of COVID on Tel Aviv's gay-pride parade. 'In the long term,' he once told an interviewer, he wanted Israel to be 'run according to the laws of Torah,' as in the days of King David.
Israel's most recent election, in 2022, catapulted Smotrich to greater power. A short-lived, uncomfortable electoral alliance among his party, Ben-Gvir's, and a splinter religious group won 14 seats in the 120-member Knesset, seven of them for Smotrich's Religious Zionism party. In the new government, Netanyahu made him finance minister. More significantly, he was given a new ministerial post within the Defense Ministry, with wide powers over settlement planning and building. Moving these responsibilities from the army to a civilian official has been aptly criticized as a significant step toward formal annexation of the West Bank—a strategic goal of the settlement movement. Smotrich has used his authority to speed settlement expansion at an extraordinary pace, effectively serving his settler constituency.
Despite its small size, the Religious Zionism party has been an equal partner to Netanyahu's Likud in the government's effort to transform Israel's regime. Indeed, it was Religious Zionism, not Likud, that ran in the last election on a platform of hobbling the judicial system. A Religious Zionist Knesset member, Simcha Rothman, chairs the committee responsible for constitutional changes and has pushed along measures designed to give the prime minister and ruling coalition autocratic power. To a large extent, Likud is carrying out Smotrich's program.
Then came the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Smotrich treated the catastrophe as an opportunity. In a post on X a year after the war began, he wrote that he'd been expecting the reconquest of Gaza ever since the evacuation of settlements in 2005. 'In the end there will be Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip,' he wrote. In other words, the setback would be reversed, and history would proceed on its divinely determined track.
In January, when Israel reached a two-stage hostage deal with Hamas, Smotrich pledged that his party would bolt the governing coalition if Netanyahu proceeded to the second stage, which would include a cease-fire ending the war. Ben-Gvir did quit the coalition, promising to return 'if the war is resumed.' Smotrich's threat amounted to the same thing: Ending the war would mean the fall of the government. In March, after the first stage of the deal, the government chose to resume the war, and the coalition survived.
If being the vanguard means exerting power, Smotrich has succeeded. If it means leading the masses, he has failed. Polls consistently cast doubt on whether Religious Zionism would receive the 3.25 percent of the national vote it would need to enter the Knesset in new elections. Its success in the last election was likely attributable to Ben-Gvir's relative popularity, which brought votes to their joint ticket.
The Rabble-Rouser
Ben-Gvir, 49, comes out of a separate stream of the radical right, with a different theological progenitor. The American-born rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded the Jewish Defense League in New York, had his own perverse religious doctrine. In traditional Judaism, a Jew who is dishonest or cruel 'desecrates the Name of God.' In Kahane's theology, Jewish weakness was the sacrilege, and Jewish strength sanctified God. He made vengeance a central religious value.
Kahane moved to Israel in the 1970s and established a party called Kach, or 'Thus!,' whose platform included expelling all Arabs from Israel. In 1984, Kach won a single Knesset seat. In an act of what's known as defensive democracy, the parliament responded by banning racist parties from elections. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990.
His movement survived him. Ben-Gvir became a Kach activist as a teenager growing up in a Jerusalem suburb. He was 17 in early 1994, when the Kahane disciple Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians at the Hebron shrine known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. The rampage ended when Palestinian worshippers managed to kill Goldstein; Kahanists and others on the Israeli far right elevated him as a martyr. The Israeli government declared Kach to be a terrorist organization, effectively outlawing it. But its members formed new groups, some of which were also declared illegal.
These groups vehemently opposed the peace process with the Palestinians that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was pursuing through the Oslo Accords. In October 1995, during the Knesset debate on Oslo II, Ben-Gvir was one of the right-wing protesters who surrounded the prime minister's armored Cadillac as his driver brought it to the Knesset. Someone ripped off the hood ornament and gave it to Ben-Gvir, who afterward held it up before a TV cameraman and said, 'Just as we got to the ornament, we can get to Rabin.' Weeks later, another far-rightist assassinated Rabin. Ben-Gvir was not involved, but the ornament clip was shown repeatedly to illustrate the incitement that had led to murder. He'd achieved his first 15 minutes of fame, but not his last.
In the years that followed, as an activist on the far-right fringe, Ben-Gvir acquired a long list of arrests and a shorter list of convictions. They included guilty verdicts for support of a terrorist organization—Kach—and incitement to racism.
Meanwhile, he moved to Kiryat Arba, a West Bank settlement next to Hebron; got a law degree; and became known as a defense lawyer for right-wing extremists. In their living room, he and his wife hung a photograph of Goldstein. He once sued a journalist who called him a Nazi. The court awarded him one shekel in damages. In his testimony, he said he was 'in favor of expelling Arabs.' He also testified that he'd read all of Kahane's books, and that Israel should be ruled by biblical law.
Nonetheless, Ben-Gvir's rhetoric lacks Kahane's theological flavor. 'It's about tribes and revenge,' Yehudah Mirsky told me of Ben-Gvir's political style. 'It's very primal.' But what Ben-Gvir seems to have learned from his master, most of all, is the value of public provocation and displays of anger. In a typical move, he showed up at the site of a Palestinian terror attack in Jerusalem in 2014 with a handful of supporters to demand that the government take harsh steps against Arabs. The media paid attention.
To be elected, Ben-Gvir toned down his rhetoric just enough to avoid being disqualified under the anti-racism law. The supreme court, historically reluctant to bar parties, gave him a pass. 'I'm not for expelling all the Arabs,' he said in one interview. 'I'm for expelling the terrorists, the people who throw stones.' The Goldstein photo came down from his wall.
After several failed attempts, Ben-Gvir made his way into the Knesset as the head of the Jewish Power Party in 2021, running together with Smotrich's party. After the alliance's success in the following election, Ben-Gvir demanded and received the ministry that administers the national police. Violating law and tradition, Ben-Gvir has politicized the force. In the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians has soared, and law enforcement has faded. Inside Israel, at Ben-Gvir's urging, police have responded harshly to the constant protests against the government.
Meanwhile, the rate of traffic deaths has climbed sharply—due to a lack of enforcement, according to a state agency. In Ben-Gvir's first year as minister, the murder rate in Israel nearly doubled, and it has stayed high since.
That record seems to have little effect on Ben-Gvir's popularity. Polling shows that if elections were held now and his party ran on its own, it would win eight or nine Knesset seats. Smotrich's message may appeal to a small ideological sect, but Ben-Gvir's ideology-lite anger connects him to a significant slice of the public—one moved less by political philosophy than by hostility toward Arabs, the left, and liberal institutions.
When elections are held, Netanyahu will most likely press the two rivals to run again on a single ticket. That's what he did last time, out of fear that one of the parties would not pass the electoral threshold, costing his bloc the election.
Indeed, Netanyahu's role is key to understanding the power of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. The rise of chauvinistic, illiberal parties and movements is an international phenomenon. What that means for any particular country, however, depends on how mainstream conservative parties respond. Do they form coalitions with the insurgent right, as has happened in Croatia and the Netherlands? Or do they shun them, as in Portugal and Germany, forming alliances with the center and left instead?
In Israel, Netanyahu has become anathema to moderate parties. To stay in power, he has helped engineer the electoral success of the far right. He has legitimized it for part of the public by bringing it into government. At the same time, he has competed with it by adopting much of its antidemocratic program. If Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have power beyond their numbers in his government, they are monsters Netanyhau has helped create.