In a small office in the industrial district of Lod, a city outside Tel Aviv where Israeli forces expelled thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war, sits the campaign headquarters of Otzma Yehudit, or “Jewish Power.” The ultra-nationalist party is led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right firebrand once deemed too extreme to serve in Israel’s military. He now sits in Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet as national security minister, overseeing the country’s police and prison services.
If Ben-Gvir has his way, the Oct. 27 election will give his party more seats in parliament and himself greater leverage over another right-wing government led by Netanyahu. His ambition is not to replace the prime minister but to make him even more dependent on the hardline parties pushing for Palestinians to leave Gaza and the West Bank—and for Israel to extend sovereignty over the territories.
“I want Netanyahu to be prime minister. He’s a leader. I prefer him a million times over Eisenkot,” Ben-Gvir tells me in a rare interview on Oct. 19, referring to Netanyahu’s chief rival, the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot. Pounding his chest, he adds: “What will really help Netanyahu be right wing is if I, Ben-Gvir, will be a senior minister and it’s a full right-wing government.”
The post he covets is defense minister, which would give him command over Israel’s armed forces and greater authority to pursue his vision for Gaza and the West Bank: fewer constraints on military operations, the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from both territories, and the expansion of Israeli control over lands he believes belong to the Jewish people. Netanyahu has resisted giving Ben-Gvir the portfolio. But Ben-Gvir and his allies hope to win enough seats to force Netanyahu to accommodate their demands or risk losing power. He may benefit from the rightward shift of Israeli politics, particularly among younger voters drawn to his confrontational style and uncompromising vision of Jewish sovereignty. In a Channel 12 survey of first-time Jewish voters, nearly three-quarters identified as right-wing or center-right.
Polls suggest a tight contest, with Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party edging ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud in several recent surveys, but neither the prime minister’s right-wing bloc nor the opposition appears close to the 61 Knesset seats needed to govern. An average of four recent polls puts the two camps at roughly 50 and 53 seats, respectively, leaving Arab parties and smaller factions potentially pivotal. The result could be another fragile coalition; an unlikely unity government between Netanyahu and Eisenkot; or a prolonged deadlock that sends Israelis back to the polls.
“If Israel wants to continue to live and not be destroyed, we have to capture all of Gaza,” he says. “We have to promote voluntary emigration. Gaza could be a Riviera. It’s a beautiful place. But we can’t have one Hamas member there.” His proposal would have Palestinians leave Gaza for countries willing to receive them, and then allow Israelis to establish settlements in the coastal enclave. It would reverse a defining decision of an earlier right-wing prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who in 2005 withdrew Israeli forces and evacuated more than 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza.
Ben-Gvir offers no clear explanation of which countries would accept large numbers of Palestinians, or how their departure could be considered voluntary under the conditions he proposes. “Gaza was always ours,” he says. “Israel is a tiny country. We have to be wider, broader. Hamas are terrorists who don’t just want to destroy Israel. They want to destroy the whole world.”
When I suggest that removing Palestinians from Gaza and resettling it would deepen Israel’s international isolation, he dismisses the concern. “I think that the stronger we are, we won’t be isolated,” he says. “Israel is isolated when it’s weak. If we help the population leave Gaza, we can be very strong.”
His ambitions in the West Bank are no less sweeping. Ben-Gvir wants Israel to annex the territory, which he, like most Israelis, calls by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria. It is home to 3.3 million Palestinians and governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA), created by the 1993 Oslo Accords that envisioned a Palestinian state. Controlled by the Fatah party, the PA has a lightly armed security force that is trained by the U.S. military and historically works with Israel to suppress terror attacks. But Ben-Gvir wants Israeli security control over the area Palestinians envisage as the heartland of a future state. “We need to take away the weapons for the Palestinian Authority,” he says. “As of now, they are training in Jericho. They’re not training to direct traffic, are they? They want to do another Oct. 7.” A spokesperson for the PA did not respond to a request for comment.
The vision goes beyond annexation. Ben-Gvir says he would encourage millions of Palestinians who have lived in the West Bank for generations to pack up and go. “We want sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, where we also want voluntary emigration,” he says. “Just so we understand, we want voluntary emigration—not kicking anyone out. People will choose the option to leave.”
Ben-Gvir, 50, was born into a relatively secular Jewish family of Iraqi and Kurdish descent in Mevaseret Zion, a suburb of Jerusalem. His mother had belonged to the Irgun, the Jewish underground that fought British rule before Israel’s founding, but his parents were, by all accounts, not ideological zealots. Ben-Gvir took a different path. He became religious at 12 and, amid the violence of the first Palestinian intifada, gravitated toward the teachings of Meir Kahane, the American-born rabbi who advocated expelling Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. By his teens, he was an activist in Kahane’s movement, which Israel eventually outlawed as a terrorist organization. Ben-Gvir was considered so extreme that the Israeli military barred him from compulsory service.
Today, Ben-Gvir continues to revere Kahane, even as he disavows some of his mentor’s most fanatical positions. “I went to his yeshiva. He did a lot of good things. He protected Jews. He was murdered sanctifying God’s name,” he tells me. “Not everything that he did do I fully agree with. In the past, I thought we should kick out all the Arabs from the land of Israel. Now I think there can be some. I accept that there are some Arabs who live here. And I have no problem with part of them. Those who recognize the State of Israel as the Jewish state. Those who are loyal to the Jewish State.”
As a young adult, Ben-Gvir moved to Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement overlooking the Palestinian city of Hebron, where Kahane’s legacy runs particularly deep. According to published accounts, he and his future wife, Ayala, visited the grave of Baruch Goldstein on their first date. Goldstein, an American-born physician and Kahane admirer, had massacred 29 Palestinian Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994 before being beaten to death by survivors. For years, Ben-Gvir displayed Goldstein’s portrait in his living room. He became an attorney for Jewish settlers and activists accused of extremist violence. He also acquired a criminal record, including convictions for incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization.
For years, Ben-Gvir remained on the fringes of Israeli politics, a familiar presence at settler demonstrations but an unlikely candidate for national office. Over time, he softened some of his rhetoric, publicly distanced himself from Kahane’s demand to remove all Arabs, and cultivated a more approachable persona without abandoning his annexationist aspirations.
Ben-Gvir also encouraged Jewish prayer at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, challenging a decades-old arrangement governing the disputed religious site, which has traditionally permitted Jews to visit but reserved the right to worship there for Muslims. Under Ben-Gvir, Israeli police have increasingly allowed Jews to pray at the site, a deliberate provocation to the Arab world, drawing condemnation from Palestinian and Jordanian authorities. “It used to be an apartheid up there and Jews could not pray,” he tells me. “That could not happen in any normal country. I returned justice to the Temple Mount.”
Ben-Gvir has also become one of the leading voices on the Israeli right seeking to shift responsibility for Oct. 7 away from Netanyahu and onto Israel’s military and intelligence establishment. Among the claims he repeats is that security officials failed to wake the prime minister as the attack unfolded—which is disputed by former security officials.
“Even if he’s not perfect, and even if he made mistakes, and he indeed made mistakes, what screwed him up on Oct. 7 was our intelligence,” Ben-Gvir says of Netanyahu. “The army, the intelligence, the Shin Bet. They are all to blame,” he adds. “Netanyahu is not clear of blame, but there are many people who are more at fault than him.”
Ben-Gvir’s relationship with the prime minister is not exactly warm. “I’m not backing him; I’m not his crony on everything. I think he’s much better than Eisenkot,” Ben-Gvir says. “I want to be next to him. I want him to be very strong. I want to pull him to the right.”
He tells me he would not join a unity government between Netanyahu and Eisenkot, a possibility if neither can assemble a governing coalition. “Governments like that are never good,” he says. “It's dancing in two weddings.” Besides, he adds, “It won’t fulfill my dreams.”
Ben-Gvir, on the other hand, wants Israeli sovereignty and the departure of much of Gaza’s Palestinian population. He cites polling that he says shows 52% of Gazans want to leave the territory, devastated by years of war and Hamas rule. If Israel helps that majority leave, he reasons, those who remain will eventually want to follow. “They will see it is successful for them, they’ll see there’s a future, there’s a life,” he says. “There’s good places in the world. Pretty places.” He offers no evidence that the remaining population would choose to relocate, or how such a migration could be arranged without coercion.
For Ben-Gvir and his allies, the coming election offers a chance to advance a far-reaching transformation of Israeli politics and society—to move the country toward a maximalist vision of a Jewish state, one with expanded territorial ambitions, fewer judicial constraints, and a government less inclined to heed international objections. Ben-Gvir dismisses concerns that such policies would cement Israel’s status as a pariah state. In his telling, the military campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran demonstrate the value of uncompromising power. “We made Israel stronger,” he says. “When Israel is stronger, the world respects that.”
