Itamar Ben-Gvir, heel

In professional wrestling, the “heel”, or bad guy, can be more important than the “face”, or good guy. A heel who can’t inspire an audience to hate him isn’t worth a hero’s time. A truly loathsome heel, on the other hand, is worth being beat​en up by anyone.

He would have been great in World Wrestling Entertainment

I find Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister and leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, absolutely fascinating. He looks very much like he is being a heel.   

He even looks hateable — by which I don’t mean that he’s ugly but that he presents himself with narrow eyes and a malicious grin. He looks like Jim Cornette in the 1980s — or some sort of mutant frog who is trying to take his revenge on mankind.

Ben-Gvir is consistently and deliberately provocative. People sometimes talk about “dog whistles” from politicians, but Ben Gvir could be heard by naked mole-rats. His Israeli supremacism is so extreme that he was barred from joining the army when he was 18.

A longtime admirer of the ultra-nationalist Meir Kahane (though he has, in fairness, disavowed Kahane’s advocacy for expelling all Arabs from Israel), a young Ben-Gvir was first noted for swiping an ornament from the car of the moderate Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin. “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too,” Ben-Gvir is reported to have said. Rabin was assassinated soon afterwards.

As a lawyer, Ben-Gvir has represented a string of Israel’s most violent settlers. For him, “Hilltop Youth”, who construct illegal settlements and terrorise Palestinian civilians, are the “salt of the earth”. Ben-Gvir has also been reported to have paid tribute to Baruch Goldstein — a religious extremist who killed 29 Palestinian men, women and children in Hebron in 1994.

Ben-Gvir is an Israeli supremacist, then, to the point of almost completely dehumanising Palestinians. But the outrageous things he says and does do not seem to be just ideological. They also seem to be outrageous for the sake of being outrageous.

Ben-Gvir, in other words, is the political equivalent of an online troll. He waddles about defending Jewish people who spat at Christians, advocating the removal of Palestinians, and taunting and intimidating prisoners. He clearly loves to be the centre of attention. In his latest stunt, he has been filmed mocking pro-Palestine activists who have been convicted by the Israelis.

Such cruel, lawless and uncivilised behaviour is a bad look for the Israelis. Amid international criticism, Israeli politicians up to and including Benjamin Netanyahu have denounced Ben-Gvir. “The way that Minister Ben-Gvir dealt with the flotilla activists is not in line with Israel’s values and norms,” lectured the Israeli prime minister ineffectually.

Netanyahu could fire Ben-Gvir — a man who was not fit to join the IDF, let alone the Ministry of National Security. But Otzma Yehudit is an important coalition partner for Netanyahu’s Likud. A quarter of voters of Netanyahu’s coalition would like Ben Gvir to be his successor, which is more than have endorsed any other candidate.

This represents a striking level of extremism in Israeli society. But Ben Gvir is obviously trying to amplify that extremism. His enthusiasm not just for being malicious but for being seen to be malicious is pathetic. (It’s bad enough to be a bully without being a try-hard). But there is a point to it. In making himself notorious on the world stage, he is appealing to Israelis who have been reacting defensively against international criticism. In stirring up world opinion against himself, a man who furiously and energetically advocates for the Israeli cause, he makes his compatriots feel that defending Israel — and, by extension, defending themselves — means supporting him and his agenda. Supporting Ben-Gvir will even isolate them from their own leadership, who are held back from embracing full-throated tribalism by pesky moral norms or just a sense of what makes for bad PR. (For supporters of Ben-Gvir, though, it might seem PR concerns have become entirely beside the point.)

There is something Trumpian about this, though even Trump had a sense of humour and wouldn’t have gone to a detention facility to taunt deportees in person. As the Iran War continues to fail, though, Trump’s barbaric sentiments towards the outgroup have continued to escalate. His MAGA ecosphere is full of influencers orchestrating crass stunts and issuing extreme proclamations. Perhaps instead of Ben-Gvir being Trumpian, the MAGA movement is becoming Ben-Gvirian.

A more fragmented world offers greater incentives for hostile and embattled tribalism. We know all about the excesses of universalist ideology, and the threat of oikophobia, but the international risks of demagogic chauvinism are considerable.

Still, I do find Ben-Gvir morbidly fascinating. He would have been great in World Wrestling Entertainment. Unfortunately, like a lot of other pathological personalities, he entered politics.