Itamar Ben-Gvir: The extremist in Netanyahu's government wants the elimination of the "internal enemy"

There are ideologies that haunt a state's history like ghosts. One thinks they have vanished, but in times of crisis, they return – more threatening than ever. Kahanism is one of these ghosts of Israeli politics. When Rabbi Meir Kahane chanted his slogans in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the 1980s, he seemed like an alien presence: a fanatical immigrant from Brooklyn whose demands for the expulsion of Arabs sent shockwaves even through the right-wing camp.

Today, however, almost 35 years after Kahane's assassination, an avowed follower of this doctrine, along with his faction, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Strength), sits in the Israeli cabinet: Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security. What once seemed like a radical fantasy has taken concrete form in the everyday lives of the police, the judiciary, and the legislature.

To understand the explosiveness of this development, one must recall Kahane's thinking. He was no ordinary nationalist, but a violent man who inextricably linked religion and politics. In Brooklyn, he founded the Jewish Defense League, a hybrid of street thugs and vigilante groups. They defended Jews against anti-Semitism, including with bomb threats and street terror.

When Rabbi Kahane emigrated to Israel, he brought this mentality with him. For him, the land was not merely the homeland of the Jewish people, but divine possession reserved exclusively for Jews. He considered Arabs fundamentally "enemies." He rejected democracy; he sought a guarantee of exclusive Jewish supremacy. Anyone who spoke in his presence of equal rights for all citizens was branded a "traitor." For him, the State of Israel was not a value in itself, but a stage in the transition to the religiously based, complete rule of the Jewish people over the entire Land of Israel.

At that time, Israeli society was immune to such open anti-Arab incitement. In 1988, the Supreme Court declared Kahane's party, Kach, racist and banned its participation in the elections. But the seeds had been sown. Kahane's speeches about "transfer," about the "eradication" of the Arab presence through expulsion, circulated on paper and tape. In the settlements on the outskirts of Hebron and Nablus, young activists became his followers. One of them was Itamar Ben-Gvir, then a teenager from Kiryat Arba, who later proudly confessed to having "idolised" Kahane.

As early as the early 1990s, Ben-Gvir acted as a youthful provocateur. He became notorious when he stole the emblem from the car of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, grinned at the cameras, and said: "We've reached the car, we'll reach him too."

A few weeks later, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. Ben-Gvir was never imprisoned for this threat, but his words were part of the atmosphere that made the political assassination possible. Anyone who believed then that such figures would remain on the sidelines forever is mistaken today. Thirty years later, the same man controls the Israeli police.

Ben-Gvir's rise demonstrates how Kahanism and the mainstream have intertwined. The escalations of recent years—Palestinian knife attacks, rockets from Gaza, the street fighting between Jews and Arabs in Lod, Acre, and Jaffa in 2021—brought him sudden popularity. His message was simple and brutal: Arabs were disloyal, and they needed to be controlled and intimidated. While moderate right-wingers laboriously tried to distinguish between terrorists and citizens, Ben-Gvir applied the old Kahanist equation: Every Arab is a threat. This resonated with segments of the population.

His rhetoric became political practice. As Minister of National Security, Ben-Gvir secured powers that gave him direct influence over the police. He now decides on promotions, operational planning, and operational priorities, not the police leadership. The consequences were quickly apparent: While hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrated against the judicial reform in 2023, the police intervened with increasing severity on orders from above: Water cannons, baton charges, and arrests of even older Israelis who were merely bystanders became the new normal.

At the same time, police security forces often remained passive when settlers in the West Bank attacked Palestinian villages. Human rights organizations documented dozens of such cases. This asymmetry corresponds precisely to the Kahanist principle: ruthless severity against "internal enemies," leniency for one's own fighters. Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir wants to enforce a ban on protesters blocking and occupying streets in the future. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara stated that such a decision is beyond his authority. But how long will this interest Ben-Gvir, given that the governing coalition wants to get rid of Baharav-Miara anyway?

Kahane's line also extends to Ben-Gvir's gun policy. As early as the 1980s, he advocated for armed vigilante groups. Ben-Gvir is now implementing this idea with state funding: He has issued tens of thousands of new gun licenses, particularly to Jews in mixed-race cities. Officially, this is done for "self-defense." In reality, however, it means that every street scene, every dispute between neighbors, has the potential to become a bloodbath.

Critics warn of a privatization of violence, precisely what Kahane preached as "protecting the Jewish people." Earlier this week, Ben-Gvir announced that he would issue gun licenses to citizens of five additional regions and cities.

Ben-Gvir never made a secret of his stance. In 1994, the doctor Baruch Goldstein, a Kahanist, shot 29 praying Muslims in Hebron. The mass murder shocked the world, and afterward, Kach was definitively taboo in Israel. Yet Goldstein's picture continued to hang in some settler homes, including the apartment of Itamar Ben-Gvir, as journalists later discovered. For a long time, he defended the poster as a private matter. Only when he wanted to become a minister did he take it down. But the message was clear: the Kahanist heroes remain his points of reference.

His language leaves no doubt about this. In 2023, he declared on television: "The right for me and my children to move freely is more important than the right of Arabs to freedom of movement." He spoke of Palestinian citizens as "enemies" who "must leave the country." When he recently visited Marwan Barghouti, one of the most prominent Palestinian terrorists and former Tanzim leader, in an Israeli prison, he shouted at him: "We will wipe you out." Such statements would have been scandalous 30 years ago; today, they are broadcast on the evening news, spoken by a member of the government.

To understand the unique nature of this rupture, it is worth comparing it with Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), the settler movement that emerged after the Six-Day War in 1967. Their ideology is based on the teachings of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. These settlers were also so-called "religious Zionists." They, too, rejected the return of land to the Palestinians and, too, viewed the settlement of the entire Land of Israel as a divine mandate. Yet for them, the State of Israel, despite all its secular "sins," remained the instrument of redemption. They wanted to strengthen it, not undermine it, at least not in the first decades of their activity.

Kahane, on the other hand, always deeply distrusted the state; he wanted to radically transform it. Ben-Gvir operates precisely within this logic. He doesn't accept institutions as they are, but bends them to his ideology. The police almost become a personal militia; the judicial reform, which Ben-Gvir naturally supports, becomes a lever against the separation of powers and liberal judges; his weapons policy serves to implement Kahane's vision of a militarized society.

Thus, history and the present blur. Kahane's call for "transfer" is repeated today in more catchy terms: Ben-Gvir, for example, speaks of "voluntary emigration" for Palestinians from Gaza, and he advocates giving them "incentives" to emigrate. What sounds like economic assistance is in fact the same idea as Kahane's: to "liberate" the country from Arabs.

The impact is evident in the streets: Settler violence in the West Bank has increased in recent years; villages are being burned down, olive groves destroyed, and people are being beaten. This is exactly how Kahane once envisioned the "voluntary transfer": not with trucks that would transport people away in an orderly manner, but with terror that would make their lives unbearable.

Even within Israel, Ben-Gvir isn't interested in Palestinian citizens. Crime is rising in their communities, but the police aren't bothered. And almost nobody cares. Ben-Gvir is profiting from the fear and anger of many Jewish Israelis. His poll numbers are rising, and his party is likely to make significant gains in new elections. The message is simple: Only toughness protects. And toughness means treating Arabs as a collective, discriminating against them.

Thus, Kahanism is becoming the reality of government and the new normal. While Kahane was once expelled from the Knesset, his spiritual disciple now sits in the cabinet. The crucial question is how long a democratic state can survive if its security forces are reshaped in Kahane's spirit.