On destruction from within – Ruth Margalit in The New Yorker:

‘Late last year, as Israel swore in the most right-wing government in its history, a despairing joke circulated online. A picture broken into squares to resemble a captcha—the test designed to tell you from a robot—depicted the members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. The caption read, “Select the squares in which people who have been indicted appear.” The correct answer involved half of them. It was the kind of message that has become typical of Israel’s center and left in recent years: grim, cynical, ultimately resigned.
A few weeks later, Netanyahu’s cabinet introduced the first stage in a judicial overhaul that would weaken the country’s Supreme Court and render the government largely impervious to oversight. Right-wing legislators had floated a similar measure before, but it was regarded as too drastic. What changed, Netanyahu’s opponents say, is that he is a defendant now, on trial for allegedly providing political favors to tycoons in exchange for personal gifts and positive press coverage—charges that he denies. By removing constraints on executive power, the overhaul threatened to place Israel among the ranks of such illiberal democracies as Hungary and Poland. In an extraordinarily blunt speech, the country’s chief justice, Esther Hayut, called it a “fatal blow” to democratic institutions. Since then, tens of thousands of protesters have poured into the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities each Saturday. One marcher’s placard summed up the sentiment: “For Sale: Democracy. Model: 1948. No brakes.”’

(…)

‘Protesters warn that Israeli headlines have begun to read like a manual for future autocracies, with ministers seemingly handpicked to undermine the departments they run. The new justice minister intends to strip away the judiciary’s power. The communications minister has threatened to defund Israel’s public broadcaster, reportedly hoping to funnel money to a channel favorable to Netanyahu. The minister of heritage has called organizations representing Reform Jews an “active danger” to Jewish identity.’

(…)

‘Ben-Gvir, who is forty-six, has been convicted on at least eight charges, including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism, compiling a criminal record so long that, when he appeared before a judge, “we had to change the ink on the printer,” Dvir Kariv, a former official in the Shin Bet intelligence agency, told me. As recently as last October, Netanyahu refused to share a stage with him, or even to be seen with him in photographs. But a series of disappointing elections persuaded Netanyahu to change his mind.
Netanyahu has been Israel’s dominant political figure for a generation, serving as Prime Minister for an unprecedented fifteen years. In 2021, though, he was sidelined by a parliamentary coalition that, for the first time, included an independent Arab party. During the elections last year, Netanyahu returned with what one legal scholar described as “a knife between his teeth.” To secure a winning coalition, he orchestrated an alliance between Jewish Power and another far-right party, Religious Zionism. The alliance ended up winning the third-largest share of seats in parliament, outperforming expectations so radically that Netanyahu now faced the disagreeable prospect of sharing power with Ben-Gvir—a man whom the former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described as a more imminent danger to Israel than a nuclear-armed Iran. Rather than give him a sinecure, Netanyahu named him the national-security minister. In Israel, the embattled left wing stopped asking whether a figure as divisive as Ben-Gvir could reach the highest levels of power. Instead, the question became: Can he be contained?’

(…)

‘Ben-Gvir began attending the Kahane memorial when he was a teen-ager, and eventually became its host. He used to call up reporters, promising them provocations—such as a noose to threaten an Arab lawmaker—to entice them to cover the event. The movement was considered marginal. “It was a joke how small it was,” Kariv, the former Shin Bet official, said. It has since expanded to include a political party (Jewish Power), a financial arm (the Fund to Save the People of Israel), and a militant anti-assimilation group (Lehava, or Flame). In the latest election, according to one estimate, a third of all Israeli soldiers voted for Ben-Gvir.’

(…)

‘Most Israelis first heard of Itamar Ben-Gvir in the fall of 1995—a tense time in Israeli history. Even as suicide bombers struck with alarming frequency, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed a historic peace accord with Palestinian leaders. But the deal conceded tracts of Israeli-occupied land in the West Bank, which the right wing considered a betrayal. Protests grew violent. On October 11th, a nineteen-year-old Ben-Gvir appeared on television, wearing a pale-blue T-shirt, with his arm in a sling. He was holding a Cadillac emblem that had been ripped from the Prime Minister’s car. “Just like we got to this emblem, we can get to Rabin,” he said. Three weeks later, a right-wing law student named Yigal Amir approached Rabin at a peace demonstration in Tel Aviv and shot him twice. Rabin died soon afterward.’

(…)

‘Those who knew Ben-Gvir as a teen-ager recall an intelligent, charismatic boy with an easy smile. One school friend said that he was “a bit of an outsider,” but added, using a term that denotes aggressive behavior, “There were much scarier arsim than Itamar.” Ben-Gvir attended a vocational high school in Jerusalem, where a former teacher remembered him as serious and engaged—sitting in the front row, “like he didn’t want to be disturbed.” His affiliation with Kach was known at school, the teacher added, but it wasn’t unusual: “Most students came from very right-wing families.”’

(…)

‘While Ben-Gvir’s old high-school classmates served in the Israel Defense Forces, he stayed at the yeshiva, absorbing extremist ideas. The Army had refused to conscript him. “There are only very few that we don’t recruit,” a former senior defense official told me. Why not Ben-Gvir? I asked. The official stared at me and said, “Give someone like that a weapon?”’

(…)

‘In 2011, he invited the press to a public pool in Tel Aviv, where he appeared with forty Sudanese migrant workers. He bought them all tickets to enter the pool, and, while cameras rolled, handed them swimsuits. “I want all the pampered Tel Avivians to understand that if we give human rights to the Sudanese they will come here,” he told reporters. Laughing, he called out to the migrants, in English, “Swim! Swim!”’

(…)

‘Kariv, who tracked both men’s activities during the early two-thousands, broadly agreed with that depiction. He posited an index of threats, borrowed from one maintained by the Shin Bet department that handles “non-Arab terrorism,” in which such acts as damaging holy sites and mounting terror attacks on Palestinians are at the top of a scale from one to ten. By that measure, he said, Ben-Gvir was a three. Smotrich? A seven.’

(…)

‘Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir tried to join the settlers of Gaza before the evacuation. But, according to Sade, who was part of his entourage for the trip, the settlers considered the Kahanists rabble-rousers and agitators. “They turned the sprinklers on us,” he said. As the evacuation became imminent, the group, which included Ben-Gvir, his wife, and Bentzi Gopstein, took over an abandoned Jewish-owned hotel on the Gazan shore, and squatted there for several months. By the empty pool, they spray-painted “Death to the Arabs.” In the coming weeks, they were joined by sympathizers, until there were a hundred and fifty squatters clustered around the hotel. Finally, the police raided the building, in a sprawling operation that involved six hundred officers. Ben-Gvir and Ayala were nowhere to be found, according to Sade. “They had gone shopping two hours earlier,” he told me. It wasn’t the only time that Ben-Gvir disappeared at a critical juncture, he said. In his view, this raised the possibility that Ben-Gvir had coöperated with the Shin Bet, and been tipped off about the raid.’

(…)

‘I asked Kariv whether the rumors about Ben-Gvir’s involvement with the Shin Bet had any merit. “Even off the record, I wouldn’t tell you if it was or wasn’t true,” he said.
I mentioned Liberman’s radio interview, and noted, “A defense minister insinuated this.” “And the wife of a Prime Minister,” Kariv volunteered.’

(…)

‘The overhaul of the judiciary only sharpened the country’s divisions. It will, among other things, give the Knesset the ability to override Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority, and allow the government to control a committee that appoints judges. “The concern is unrestrained political majorities doing whatever they want,” Adam Shinar, a professor of constitutional law at Reichman University, told me. “And, of course, who’s going to be the victim? Probably Palestinians, women generally, asylum seekers, Israeli Palestinian citizens, L.G.B.T.Q., religious minorities, Reform, Conservative.” In other words, Shinar said, groups without much of a lobby in the Knesset, whose only redress is through the court system. I mentioned that liberals had raised such concerns in the past, and asked whether it was possible that they were crying wolf. “What people forget about that parable is that the wolf does come in the end,” Shinar said.’

Read the article here.

The extremist who is an informer and the informer who turns out to be an extremist. We have seen it before.

The army wouldn’t give him a gun, he ended up as minister.

Netanyahu is his big enabler, it’s easy to forget that.