Daniel sent us this one — and it's a political anatomy question wrapped around a video that went viral yesterday. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir showed up at a detention facility where activists from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla were being held, and he was filmed smirking at them, taunting them on camera. The flotilla had been intercepted in international waters trying to break the naval blockade. And here's this cabinet minister, not hiding, not leaking, but performing for the camera. The question is: who is Ben-Gvir, what movement produced him, and why does Netanyahu seem incapable of drawing a meaningful red line no matter how many times this happens?
The video is worth sitting with for a second — not for the spectacle, but because of what it reveals structurally. This wasn't a hot mic moment. He knew the cameras were on. He wanted them on. This is a minister of a sovereign government who has made humiliation itself into policy theater. And you're right to frame it as a performance, because that's the throughline of his entire career. He's been performing for different audiences for thirty years, and the performance has gotten sharper, more disciplined, more effective — and now he's running the police.
Who is this guy, and how did a movement that was literally classified as a terrorist organization end up running Israel's police force?
Itamar Ben-Gvir was born in 1976 in Mevaseret Zion, just outside Jerusalem. He was radicalized in his teens — and I mean early teens. By fourteen or fifteen he was already involved in Kach youth activities. Kach was the party founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, this Brooklyn-born rabbi who moved to Israel in 1971 and built a political movement around a very specific platform: expulsion of Arabs from the land of Israel, establishment of a theocratic state governed by halacha, and a legal prohibition on any relations between Jews and Arabs — including friendships, business partnerships, even sitting in the same café. This wasn't subtext. Kahane published a book in 1981 called "They Must Go" that laid all of this out explicitly. And Ben-Gvir, as a teenager, absorbed this wholesale.
Kahane himself — his party actually won a Knesset seat, didn't it?
One seat, in 1984. Kahane was elected to the eleventh Knesset. And the response from the rest of the political system was basically universal revulsion. Every other party boycotted his speeches. His bills were voted down unanimously — I mean eighty to one, ninety to one. The Knesset passed a law specifically designed to ban parties that incite racism, and in 1988, Kach was disqualified from running. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. And then in 1994, Baruch Goldstein — a Kach follower — walked into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and murdered twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers during Ramadan prayers. After that, Israel formally designated Kach a terrorist organization, and the United States followed suit. So by the mid-nineties, this movement is legally dead.
Yet here we are, three decades later, with Kahane's ideological grandson running the police. That's not a natural progression. Something had to bridge that gap.
That bridge is Ben-Gvir himself, and it's worth understanding how he did it. He was convicted in 2007 — convicted, not just accused — of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization. The terrorist organization was Kach. Under Israeli law, this is a criminal offense. He was sentenced to community service. And before that conviction, he was already notorious. In 1995, just before Rabin's assassination, he appeared on Israeli television holding a Cadillac emblem that had been ripped off Rabin's car, and he said into the camera: "We got to his car, we'll get to him too." Weeks later, Rabin was dead. Ben-Gvir wasn't involved in the assassination — but that clip, in retrospect, tells you everything about the political culture he was cultivating.
That's the kind of detail that makes you stop. He's threatening the prime minister on national television, and twenty-seven years later he's in the cabinet. How does someone with that record actually build a political career?
Two tracks, and he ran them both simultaneously. Track one: he became a defense attorney for Jewish extremists. This is where he weaponized Israeli legal procedures. He represented the perpetrators of the 2015 Duma arson attack — a settler couple who firebombed a Palestinian home in the West Bank, killing an eighteen-month-old toddler, Ali Dawabsheh, and his parents. Ben-Gvir defended them, and he didn't just provide legal counsel — he turned the courtroom into a political stage, arguing that Jewish suspects were being tortured by Shin Bet interrogators and framing the entire prosecution as persecution of settlers. Track two: he positioned himself as the authentic voice of the street. He organized provocations at the Temple Mount. He set up a parliamentary office in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem during the 2021 tensions. He showed up at every flashpoint, always with cameras, always performing the same role: the tough guy who says what the quiet racists only think.
The rebranding — because Otzma Yehudit, his party, doesn't call itself Kahanist. They've been careful about that.
This is the key to understanding Ben-Gvir. He didn't moderate — he rebranded. The core ideology is identical to Kahane's platform. The same texts. The same goals. What changed was the packaging. Kahane spoke in the idiom of a 1970s Brooklyn rabbi — fire and brimstone, open calls for expulsion, a kind of theatrical maximalism. Ben-Gvir speaks in the idiom of a 2020s Israeli populist. He talks about "governance" and "sovereignty" and "restoring deterrence." He's learned to use the vocabulary of the security establishment to sell the same product. But if you compare Kahane's 1981 book to Ben-Gvir's 2024 Temple Mount policy — where he personally led Jewish prayer visits, breaking the 1967 status quo that had held for fifty-seven years — the continuity is absolute. It's the same theological claim to exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the entire compound, the same rejection of any Muslim presence or claim. The difference is that Kahane would stand at the Knesset podium and scream it, and Ben-Gvir does it with a smirk and a legal brief.
It's in the flotilla video too. There's something about his affect that's different from the old far right. He's not angry. He's enjoying himself.
That enjoyment is political communication. It signals to his base: "We're winning. We're not the angry fringe anymore. We're in charge, and we're having fun." That's a much more potent message than Kahane's rage ever was. Kahane's anger communicated marginalization. Ben-Gvir's smirk communicates power. And that's the product he's selling to voters who felt, for decades, that the Israeli right talked tough about security but never actually delivered the kind of permanent, unambiguous Jewish supremacy they wanted. Ben-Gvir says: I will deliver. And I'll enjoy it.
We've established that Ben-Gvir is a Kahanist who has successfully rebranded. But the real question is why Netanyahu lets him get away with it — and that's where the coalition math gets interesting.
The thirty-seventh government of Israel was formed on December twenty-ninth, twenty twenty-two, with sixty-four seats in the Knesset — sixty-four out of one hundred twenty. That is the narrowest possible majority. Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit holds six seats. Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism party holds another seven, and Smotrich is also far-right, though from a slightly different ideological stream — more religious-nationalist than explicitly Kahanist. Together, the far-right bloc is thirteen seats. If those thirteen walk, the coalition collapses to fifty-one seats, well short of the sixty-one needed to govern.
If the coalition collapses, Netanyahu goes to elections. And if he's not prime minister, his corruption trial proceeds without the protections he's built.
This is the payoff matrix, and it's not complicated. Netanyahu is on trial in three cases — Case one thousand, Case two thousand, and Case four thousand — involving charges of fraud, breach of trust, and bribery. The trial resumed in December twenty twenty-four after the judicial overhaul effort delayed proceedings. If Netanyahu is prime minister, he has a coalition that can pass laws affecting the judiciary, can shield him from prosecution, can potentially pass immunity legislation. If he's not prime minister, he's a defendant with no institutional protection, facing a very serious possibility of conviction and prison time. So when you ask why Netanyahu doesn't fire Ben-Gvir, you have to understand what firing Ben-Gvir costs. It doesn't just cost six seats. It costs the government. And losing the government costs Netanyahu his freedom.
That framing makes it sound like Netanyahu is a hostage. And the misconception worth addressing is that he's being held captive by Ben-Gvir. That's not right. Netanyahu chose this. He could have formed a different coalition.
This is the point that a lot of the international coverage misses. After the twenty twenty-two election, Netanyahu had options. The centrist parties — Benny Gantz's National Unity, Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid — together held enough seats that a national unity government was mathematically possible. It would have been difficult, it would have required painful compromises, and it would have meant rotating the premiership or giving up on the judicial overhaul. But it was possible. Netanyahu chose not to pursue it. He chose the far-right bloc. He chose Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. He made Ben-Gvir the National Security Minister — a position with operational control over the Border Police and police in the West Bank. This wasn't a concession extracted under duress. This was a strategic decision to build a government that could pursue the judicial overhaul, that could expand settlements without internal opposition, that would never, under any circumstances, negotiate with the Palestinians. And Ben-Gvir was essential to that government not despite his extremism, but because of it. His extremism guarantees he'll never defect to a centrist coalition. He's locked in.
Netanyahu's red lines aren't about ideology — they're about survival. And if you look at the pattern, that explains why every time Ben-Gvir crosses a line, the response is a statement saying "these comments don't reflect government policy," and then nothing happens.
Let's trace the pattern. April twenty twenty-four: Ben-Gvir gives a speech in Sheikh Jarrah, the flashpoint East Jerusalem neighborhood, calling for what he described as a "new Nakba" — encouraging the displacement of Palestinians. Netanyahu's office issues a statement saying the comments "do not reflect government policy.Twenty twenty-three: Ben-Gvir says Arab members of the Knesset should be "deported." Netanyahu issues a mild rebuke. Twenty twenty-four: Ben-Gvir calls for Palestinian villages in the West Bank to be "razed." The Prime Minister's Office puts out a statement about "measured responses.The pattern is so consistent it's almost a ritual. Ben-Gvir provokes. The international community reacts. Netanyahu's office distances itself verbally. Ben-Gvir stays in his position. The policy on the ground — expanded settlements, increased police operations in the West Bank, the Temple Mount status quo erosion — continues exactly as before.
The flotilla incident fits this pattern perfectly. But there's something different about this one, isn't there? The video isn't a speech. It's not a policy statement. It's a cabinet minister, in person, taunting handcuffed detainees. That crosses a line from political rhetoric into something that looks a lot like abuse of detainees under his own ministry's custody.
That's why the international reaction has been sharper. The flotilla included vessels from Turkey, Norway, and Sweden — three countries whose governments now have a direct stake. Their citizens were in Israeli custody, and they saw a senior Israeli minister mocking them on video. The Turkish foreign ministry issued a statement within hours. The Norwegian government summoned the Israeli ambassador. The EU's foreign policy chief called it "incompatible with the standards expected of a minister of a democratic government." And the US State Department — which has been increasingly strained in its language about the current Israeli government — described the video as "deeply troubling." But here's the thing. Netanyahu knows all of this. He knew the flotilla was coming. He knew Ben-Gvir would show up. He knows the diplomatic cost. And he's decided the cost is worth paying.
Because the alternative — elections — is worse for him. But walk me through that. What actually happens if the government falls tomorrow?
Election campaigns in Israel take about three months. During that period, Netanyahu remains prime minister in a caretaker capacity, but his ability to pass legislation evaporates. The judicial overhaul is dead. The coalition's ability to shield him from prosecution — dead. And then the election happens. Current polling shows the right-religious bloc at about fifty-two or fifty-three seats — not enough to form a government without parties that have explicitly ruled out sitting with Netanyahu. Lapid has said he won't join a Netanyahu-led government. Gantz has said the same. So the most likely outcome is either a centrist coalition without Netanyahu, or a prolonged period of political paralysis with multiple elections — Israel had five elections in four years between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty-two. Either way, Netanyahu loses the premiership, and his trial proceeds without the institutional protections he's built.
Ben-Gvir knows this. So he's not just a coalition partner — he's the coalition partner with the most leverage, because Netanyahu needs him more than he needs Netanyahu.
And it's the inversion that defines the current government. In a normal coalition, the prime minister has leverage over junior partners. If the junior partner misbehaves, the prime minister can fire them and find another partner. But Netanyahu can't. Ben-Gvir's six seats are irreplaceable. There is no other party that can deliver six seats to the coalition. The ultra-Orthodox parties — Shas and United Torah Judaism — are already in. Smotrich is already in. The Likud's own right flank would revolt if Netanyahu tried to bring in a centrist party that would demand settlement freezes or Palestinian negotiations. So Ben-Gvir is the only game in town. And he knows it. He can walk away at any moment and trigger elections, and Netanyahu knows that Ben-Gvir's voters will reward him for it. Ben-Gvir's polling floor is five to six seats. He's not going anywhere. Netanyahu's polling is deteriorating. The power asymmetry is complete.
This is a rational political equilibrium. It's not chaos. It's not Netanyahu losing control. It's a stable arrangement where both parties are getting what they want — Ben-Gvir gets policy wins and performative dominance, Netanyahu gets to stay prime minister and keep his trial at bay — and the cost is absorbed by Israel's diplomatic standing, its international reputation, and the rule of law in the West Bank.
The cost is also absorbed by the people Ben-Gvir's policies directly affect. It's worth being concrete about what operational control of the police in the West Bank actually means. Ben-Gvir has authority over the Border Police, which is the primary security force operating in Palestinian areas of the West Bank and in mixed Jewish-Arab cities in Israel. He has direct influence over policing decisions, over the use of force, over the protection — or lack of protection — provided to Palestinian communities facing settler violence. This isn't theoretical. Since he took office, settler attacks on Palestinian villages have increased, and the police response has been, according to multiple human rights organizations, consistently inadequate. When Ben-Gvir taunts detainees on camera, he's not just embarrassing Israel diplomatically. He's sending a signal to the police forces under his command about what kind of behavior is tolerated, what kind of behavior is rewarded.
Let me pull on the ideological thread a bit more. You mentioned that Kahanism and the mainstream Israeli right are distinct. But there's been a blurring of that line over the past decade, hasn't there? Positions that were considered fringe in two thousand ten are now held by Likud backbenchers.
This is the mainstreaming mechanism, and it's one of the most important dynamics to understand. It didn't happen by accident. It happened through a deliberate strategy that Ben-Gvir and his political allies have pursued for years. The strategy has three components. First: insert Kahanist ideas into the political conversation through provocations that force the mainstream right to respond. When Ben-Gvir calls for expelling Arab citizens, Likud politicians are forced to either condemn him — alienating their right flank — or stay silent, which normalizes the idea. Second: recruit and place Kahanist activists into Likud itself. There are now Likud MKs who openly associate with Kahanist ideas and attend Otzma Yehudit events, and Netanyahu hasn't expelled them. Third: use coalition leverage to extract policy concessions that move the Overton window. The Temple Mount status quo erosion is the clearest example. For fifty-seven years, the understanding was that Jews could visit the Temple Mount but not pray there. Ben-Gvir has systematically broken that understanding, leading Jewish prayer services at the site, and the government hasn't stopped him. Each time he does it and nothing happens, the new normal moves a little further.
This connects to something deeper about the Israeli political system. The founding ideology of the state — Ben-Gurion's statism, mamlachtiut — was about creating strong central institutions that would transcend sectarian and ideological divisions. The army, the courts, the civil service were supposed to be above politics. What Ben-Gvir represents is the complete inversion of that.
We talked about this a bit in an earlier episode — the contrast between Ben-Gurion's vision and what the current coalition is doing. Ben-Gurion built institutions designed to be insulated from the kind of ethnic and religious particularism that had characterized Jewish political life in the diaspora. The idea was: we're building a state, and the state has to be bigger than any one faction. What Ben-Gvir wants is the opposite. He wants to capture the state's institutions and turn them into instruments of a specific ethnic and religious agenda. The police aren't supposed to be a neutral enforcer of law — they're supposed to be a tool of Jewish sovereignty. That's why he wanted the National Security Ministry in the first place. It's not a random portfolio assignment. It's the institutional lever that lets him implement the Kahanist vision from inside the state.
Where does this go? If you're trying to understand whether Netanyahu will ever draw a red line, what should you actually be watching?
Watch the coalition arithmetic, not the statements. The statements are noise. The arithmetic is signal. As long as Ben-Gvir's six seats are the difference between a stable coalition and Netanyahu's political and legal jeopardy, there will be no red line. The only thing that changes the calculus is if Netanyahu can expand his coalition to sixty-five or more seats without Ben-Gvir. That would require bringing in a party from the opposition — most likely Gantz's National Unity or Gideon Sa'ar's New Hope — and that would require policy concessions that Netanyahu's base would see as a betrayal. So the question is: what would make that betrayal less costly than keeping Ben-Gvir? And the answer is probably some combination of three things: a major security crisis that makes national unity politically imperative, a serious threat of US sanctions that directly affects the Israeli economy, or the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Israeli officials that make Ben-Gvir's presence in the government an existential diplomatic liability.
The ICC dimension is worth flagging, because it's not hypothetical. The International Criminal Court has an ongoing investigation into Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories. If arrest warrants were issued for senior Israeli officials — and Ben-Gvir's public statements and policy actions make him an obvious target — the calculus for every other coalition member changes. Suddenly, being in government with Ben-Gvir isn't just diplomatically costly; it's personally legally risky.
That's the scenario where even the coalition arithmetic might not save him. If Likud backbenchers start worrying about their own travel restrictions, their own exposure to international legal jeopardy, the internal pressure on Netanyahu to cut Ben-Gvir loose becomes much harder to resist. But we're not there yet. Right now, the international cost is mostly reputational — strongly worded statements, ambassador summons, op-eds. That's a cost Netanyahu has demonstrated he's willing to absorb indefinitely.
There's a broader pattern here that goes beyond Israel. The dynamic of far-right parties gaining influence through coalition dependency — you see versions of it in other countries. Jobbik in Hungary evolved from a paramilitary-adjacent fringe party into a more polished nationalist outfit. The Freedom Party in Austria has been in and out of government coalitions for decades. The Freedom Caucus in the US Congress operates on a similar logic: a small bloc with veto power over the larger party's agenda because the majority is narrow enough that they can't be ignored.
The common thread in all of these cases is that the mainstream center-right made a strategic decision to embrace the far right rather than work with the center-left. In Hungary, Orbán's Fidesz absorbed Jobbik's themes and voters. In Austria, the People's Party has repeatedly governed with the Freedom Party. In the US, the Republican Party's leadership has accommodated the Freedom Caucus rather than building bipartisan coalitions. Netanyahu's decision to bring Ben-Gvir into government is part of this global pattern. It's a choice, not an inevitability. The far right doesn't force its way into power — it's invited in by mainstream conservatives who calculate that sharing power with extremists is preferable to sharing power with the other side of the aisle.
That calculation has a self-reinforcing quality. Once you've governed with the far right, you've normalized them. The next time you need coalition partners, they're not the unacceptable option — they're just another party. The taboo is broken, and it doesn't come back.
That's the slow-motion normalization the flotilla video captures. This is a cabinet minister taunting detainees, and the Israeli government's response is essentially: "These comments don't reflect government policy." That sentence has been uttered so many times it's lost all meaning. It's a ritual incantation that everyone knows is empty. The international community knows it's empty. Ben-Gvir knows it's empty — that's why he keeps doing it. Netanyahu knows it's empty — that's why he keeps saying it. The only audience that matters is the domestic one, and the domestic audience is being trained to accept that this is just how politics works now.
What does this mean for anyone trying to understand where Israeli politics is heading? Let me give you three analytical takeaways. First: Ben-Gvir is not an aberration. He's the logical endpoint of a thirty-year process where coalition survival has consistently trumped ideological red lines. Every time a mainstream politician said "we'll never sit with Kahanists" and then sat with Kahanists, the line moved. Ben-Gvir didn't appear from nowhere — he walked through doors that were opened for him.
Second: the key variable to watch is not Ben-Gvir's behavior. His behavior will continue. It will probably escalate. The provocations are the point. The variable that matters is the coalition math. If Netanyahu can expand his coalition to a stable majority without Otzma Yehudit, the calculus changes. If he can't — and right now he can't — expect more flotilla incidents, more Temple Mount provocations, more statements about comments not reflecting government policy.
Third: this isn't just an Israeli story. The mechanism — far-right parties gaining power through coalition leverage in fragmented parliamentary systems — is portable. If you're looking at a European country with a fragmented party system and a center-right party that's losing ground to a far-right challenger, you're looking at a potential repeat of this dynamic. The specifics differ, but the structure is the same: a narrow majority, an indispensable extremist partner, and a mainstream leader who decides the cost of breaking with the extremists is higher than the cost of accommodating them.
That cost calculation, for Netanyahu personally, is about more than politics. It's about freedom. It's about legacy. It's about whether he ends his career as the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history or as a convicted criminal. That's the stakes. And when the stakes are that high, a video of your National Security Minister taunting detainees isn't a crisis. It's just Tuesday.
The open question — and the one worth watching over the next year — is what happens when the international cost exceeds the domestic benefit. The ICC investigation is ongoing. The US relationship is under strain in ways that go beyond the usual diplomatic friction. European countries are starting to discuss sanctions on individual Israeli officials. If any of those threats materialize, Netanyahu's calculation shifts. But until they do, Ben-Gvir is exactly where he wants to be: in the cabinet, running the police, smirking at the cameras, and completely untouchable.
The flotilla video is just the latest frame in a slow-motion normalization that's been running for three decades. Ben-Gvir is the product of a political system that decided, repeatedly, that keeping the right in power was more important than keeping the far right out. And that decision, more than any speech or policy paper, is what defines this moment in Israeli politics.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen eighties, cosmic ray detectors at the Ténéré desert site in Niger recorded approximately forty thousand high-energy muon events per square meter per day — enough that a person standing there would have roughly two muons pass through their body every single second.
Two muons a second. I'm not sure what to do with that information but I'm filing it away.
I suppose it explains a lot about the nineteen eighties. This has been My Weird Prompts, with thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want show notes and transcripts, visit myweirdprompts dot com. Rate and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll be back next week.
