(Bloomberg) -- The three women entered an Israeli synagogue and dropped leaflets advocating a deal for the release of hostages from Gaza. They were arrested by police, cuffed and accused of trespassing before being released.
A week earlier, a 27-year-old woman was locked up for 24 hours after being accused of throwing sand at Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, during an impromptu protest at a beach in Tel Aviv. Protesters gathered at the detention center where she was held.
In different times, the incidents last month might not have resonated. But they fueled growing anger in Israel over what opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies say is a worrying trend: a crackdown on dissent by a government that’s the most nationalist and religious in the country’s history, and is now pursuing a wider war against Iran-backed Islamic militants.
At the heart of it is Ben Gvir, a West Bank settler who helps set the ideological tone and has played a major role in prolonging the year-old conflict in Gaza that’s scarred relations between Israel and its western allies. He said this week Israel should crush Hezbollah after the country sent ground troops into Lebanon, sparking a barrage of missiles from Iran in revenge.
Along with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a political bedfellow from the far right, Ben Gvir was at the forefront of the judicial overhaul that deeply divided Israel and sparked mass protests before the war started a year ago.
Now they are key hawks who are loath to accept any peace deal in Gaza until the Hamas militant group is destroyed, pushing for Israel to resume control of the enclave and also tighten its grip on the West Bank.
As security chief, Ben Gvir toughened up conditions for Palestinian prisoners, made it easier for Israelis to obtain guns and replaced top law enforcement officials with allies to assert the state’s authority.
He’s also championed the rights of Jewish settlers in occupied territories and been pushing to allow Jews to pray on Temple Mount, something the Israeli government has banned since 1967 to limit friction.
“Prisons in Israel were a summer camp — I changed that and I’m proud of it,” Ben Gvir said in a recent interview with Bloomberg. He also spoke of a visit to the scene of a terror attack where a man shot the knife-wielding assailant. “He said to me ‘I got my weapon through the Ben Gvir reform. When I was contemplating whether to pull the trigger, I remembered you were in office, and took the shot.’ I was so proud,” he said.
While Ben Gvir’s own government colleagues and the Shin Bet security service have blamed him for inflaming tension, opinion polls show he is maintaining his popularity while there’s broad support for Israel’s effort to cripple Hamas and Hezbollah, both designated as terrorist organizations by Israel, the US and many of their allies.
Ben Gvir, 48, and Smotrich, 44, rose to power meteorically in 2022 after their parties combined for the election to win 14 seats in parliament. That made them key to Netanyahu’s political survival.
They were his only shot of forming a coalition that could command a majority in the legislature after other parties refused to negotiate with him following his indictment for fraud and bribery.
Ben Gvir demanded to be placed in charge of the Homeland Security Office, just two years after Netanyahu said in a TV interview that he wasn’t fit to serve in government. Smotrich was handed the keys to the Finance Ministry and given oversight of all civilian aspects of West Bank settlements. Both were granted seats in the cabinet deciding Israel’s security policy.
In recent months they’ve been in the spotlight for allegedly thwarting the ceasefire deal in Gaza and bringing home Israeli hostages in turn for the release of Palestinian prisoners.
They threatened to collapse the government if Palestinians accused of killing Israelis are released and strongly object to the withdrawal of the Israeli Army from Gaza. Ben Gvir threatened previously to quit the coalition if a permanent truce is reached with Hezbollah.
Their ability to hold Netanyahu to ransom has diminished with the recent return of veteran lawmaker Gideon Saar to the cabinet, and with it the support of his party. But Ben Gvir’s influence over the domestic security forces remains concerning for critics because of his extensive power to oversee the police.
“Israel today is less of a democracy than it was two years ago when the government came into power,” said Mordechai Kremnitzer, professor emeritus of law at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “Basic rights like freedom of expression have been significantly damaged.”
Ben Gvir started out by ordering the arrest of protesters who rioted and blocked roads in demonstrations against the judicial overhaul that was aimed at weakening courts. Those protests paused after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants and have now been replaced by ones calling to immediately bring home hostages and call an election.
The former police commissioner, Kobi Shabtai, revealed that Ben Gvir tried to stop police from securing humanitarian aid convoys on their way to Gaza, while overriding the chain of command. Two months later, Shabtai attacked Ben Gvir in his retirement speech for heavily politicizing the police, warning that it was on its way to “lose public legitimacy and even its right to exist.”
Ben Gvir’s office declined to comment for this story, beyond what he told Bloomberg in a July interview. Israeli police, meanwhile, say that the freedom of protest and speech is not a freedom to set fires, block roads and break through security barriers.
The new police commissioner handpicked by Ben Gvir for the job, Danny Levy, said at his swearing in ceremony in late August that governance and sovereignty were paramount. “We’ll fight anyone who tries to harm government authority,” he said.
Ben Gvir himself is no stranger to the hand of authority. An activist from the age of 16, he grew up on the ideology of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the American-born founder of a radical group called Kach that wanted all Arabs to leave Israel. He said he was excluded from mandatory military service because of his ties to Kach, which was outlawed in the 1990s.
Over the years, Ben Gvir was found guilty on several occasions of ideology-driven offenses, including support and possession of propaganda for a Jewish terror organization, incitement of racism, obstruction of a police officer, rioting and vandalism.
As a prominent member of Netanyahu’s government, it’s his support for West Bank settlers and access to Temple Mount that are now raising concerns.
Ben Gvir has been promoting a change to the status quo that will allow Jews to pray on the mountain, an act prohibited since Israel conquered the site in 1967. His plans have been rejected by Netanyahu, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Ben Gvir a “pyromaniac trying to set fire to the Middle East.”
Meanwhile, many of the gun licenses — 150,000 in six months compared with 8,000 during the previous year — were issued to rapid response teams, small groups of civilians trained to provide an initial defense in the case of an attack such as the one by Hamas on Oct. 7. Ben Gvir boasted raising their number to 900 from 70.
Some are in the West Bank, where there’s been a sharp change of mood over the past two years, according to Dan Turner, a professor who resides in the Ma’ale-Adumim settlement east of Jerusalem. He blamed it on discrimination based on “the commanding spirit of Ben Gvir and Smotrich.”
“The reality on the ground is that of a completely selective law enforcement and this has definitely worsened since the government came to power,” said Turner, who is a local activist for Palestinian rights.
The former head of Israeli security service Shin Bet, Nadav Argaman, said in a television interview recently that Israel was “losing itself as a democracy, step by step.”
In response, police said that officers have been working day and night since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks to save Israel in all districts including the West Bank, where they operate shoulder to shoulder with Shin Bet to arrest Palestinian militants.
Both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have been publicly scolded by US officials, including President Joe Biden, who said in an interview that if Israel “keeps up its incredibly conservative government — Ben Gvir and others — they’re going to lose support around the world.” Sanctions against the two ministers were discussed at the White House, according to news website Axios, but Biden rejected the proposal.
“I am not personally bothered by the thought of sanctions,” Ben Gvir, who has publicly endorsed Donald Trump in the US presidential race, said in the July interview with Bloomberg. “Israel, however, should be asking: is this any way to treat an ally?”
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