National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir on Tuesday visited Kibbutz Nir Oz in the Gaza envelope and upon entering the kibbutz, one protester blocked his path and cried, “He is persona non grata, we don’t want Minister Ben Gvir here He is not welcome here. Our members died on his watch, he promised us Jewish power, and because of his bankruptcy, our daughters were raped.”
Israel Hayom which reported the incident noted that only this one kibbutz member was trying to prevent Ben Gvir from entering, and was on hand to yell at the minister upon his departure. It’s quite possible that many others in Kibbutz Nir Oz were cognizant of the fact that before the October 7 catastrophe, Itamar Ben Gvir was one of the very few voices in government and in the entire Knesset who regularly challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy regarding Hamas, a policy that was based on deeply flawed assessments by the country’s security services.
Indeed, according to Ben Gvir, he had been invited by one of the heroes of Nir Oz, Yaron Maor, who saved his family during the Hamas attack. “I saw the ruined house and heard about the heroic battle he fought with only a handgun, against dozens of armed terrorists. I thank him for the invitation, Yaron is proof that weapons save lives,” Ben Gvir said after the visit.
Yes, that’s the other thing for which Ben Gvir is hated by both left- and right-wing politicians these days. He not only spoke up against Netanyahu and the security apparatus’s plying Hamas with billions of dollars and issuing permits to some 17,000 day-workers from the Gaza Strip; he also advocated for establishing strong, local standby security units who would be armed by the police.
At the time, Ben Gvir’s call against cuddling Hamas was considered yet another proof of his racism; and his call for local national guard units was his scheme to forge an armed militia to support his takeover of the country’s democratic institutions.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media was saturated with calls for the Army to oust the country’s democratically-elected prime minister.
THE ONLY WINNING RIGHT-WING POLITICIAN
On Monday, News12 published a public opinion poll that was devastating to Israel’s right and Netanyahu’s coalition.
The poll was done over the phone and Internet. It was based on a small sample group of 504 respondents from “a representative model of the entire population of Israel aged 18 and over.” Finally, the maximum sampling error was +-4.4%, which is on the high side.
Nevertheless, the results were dramatic: Benny Gantz took 37 mandates, compared to Netanyahu’s 18, and Yair Lapid’s 15. The worst hit was Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism which sank well below the 3.25% threshold vote.
But in the midst of this raging storm, one right-wing candidate not only withstood the onslaught but raised his party’s power from 7 to 8 mandates. You guessed it, Itamar Ben Gvir. If you ask me, that extra mandate could have easily come from the Gaza envelope kibbutzim, where he did quite well in the last election.
BEN GVIR IS A THREAT TO THE SECURITY ESTABLISHMENT
It goes without saying that Itamar Ben Gvir’s very presence in Netanyahu’s government irks the security establishment folks to no end. This is why Gantz conditioned his joining Netanyahu’s war cabinet on Ben Gvir and Smotrich being kept out. This led to a bizarro world situation where the very people who built up the delusional policy about a deterred Hamas that must be plied with cash and jobs are considered the adults in the room, while the people who chastised them day in and day out for their advanced myopia are stamped as irresponsible, hate-mongers, and, as that guy at the Nir Oz gate put it: “Our members died on his watch.”
Alas, politics is a contact sport with extremely high penalties even for those who did everything right.
Enter News13, the most left-biased of all of Israel’s mainstream media services, which reported that during the cabinet meeting Monday night, a loud and harsh exchange erupted between Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and Minister Ben Gvir, following which the Chief of Staff replied to Ben Gvir: Don’t threaten me.
At this point, I should share with you that in Israel, whenever someone on the right is being targeted––often baselessly––the person on the targeting end demands bodyguards to protect them. It’s a thing, part of the local folklore. This could explain why the IDF chief of staff, a veteran of numerous combats and a man in excellent physical shape, should consider himself being threatened by this pudgy politician who never served in the military.
Ben Gvir demanded that the military change the decision regarding the fighters who recited the Shema Israel in a mosque in Jenin (which, in reality, was a terrorist base). The chief of staff explained that the decision represented the values of the IDF and its commanders.
Ben Gvir, for his part, argued that he, an elected cabinet member and part of the political echelon is the one empowered to make these decisions.
The Chief of Staff replied: “You are wrong, I will decide what is a moral act in the army and what is not. Don’t threaten me.”
In retrospect, it is possible General Herzi Halevi was experiencing an existential rather than a physical threat. He was pushed into office by the previous government, well after it had lost the elections. For some reason then Defense Minister Benny Gantz couldn’t ask the serving chief of Staff, Aviv Kochavi, to stay on another couple of months to allow the new defense minister to pick the commander of his army. It was the first time that a caretaker government had the nerve to intervene so brazenly in the decision of the democratically elected government that followed.
Also, naturally, as the top commander of the army, Halevi was directly responsible for the horrifying failure of every single aspect of the country’s defense establishment. Moreover, the military intelligence corps that failed more than everyone else, had been under his command until he was appointed chief of staff by a government that may or may not have had the authority to do it.
That’s some existential threat, and that may have been at the root of Ben Gvir’s short but firm lesson on who makes the decisions in a democratic country.
