The intelligent Zionist’s response to Ben-Gvir

As a teenage protestor against the Oslo Accords, he appeared on TV brandishing an ornament ripped from Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac, boasting: “We got to his car, we’ll get to him too.” Two weeks later, Rabin was gunned down by a right-wing terrorist. The IDF exempted Ben-Gvir from military service, fearful of his ability to radicalise fellow soldiers. Until recently, he hung a portrait in his home of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish terrorist who massacred 29 Palestinians in a gun rampage at Me’arat HaMachpelah in 1994.

Earlier this year, he assured a TV interviewer that “it has been years” since he last chanted “death to Arabs”. His supporters have toned it down, too, adopting the more nuanced “death to terrorists” at campaign rallies. These days Ben-Gvir speaks of transferring only “disloyal” Arabs. He greeted his party’s electoral success with the tweet: “It’s time to be the landlord in our country.” The message was written in Hebrew but intended to be read in Arabic.

As a supporter of Israel, the prospect of this racial arsonist attaining ministerial office is horrifying. Of course, it’s for Israelis to decide the political composition of their governments. Yet while the proper response to Ben-Gvir is hotly debated among British and other Jews, we non-Jewish Zionists are less encumbered in saying what we think. I think he’s a racist thug who belongs on a street corner with a loudhailer, not in the Knesset passing laws and setting policy.

Although I revile Ben-Gvir, I don’t buy into apocalyptic talk that his elevation to the ministry will sever Israel’s relations with the diaspora or undermine the country’s moral legitimacy. There will be strains, of course, and Israel’s delegitimisers will gleefully exploit the situation to push their agenda. Allowing the far right into government is a grievous mistake but I find myself wondering why doing so should merit pariah status for Israel and not, say, Sweden or Italy.

I share the Israeli left’s revulsion at Ben-Gvir but these are not matters on which the Israeli left is terribly consistent. When right-wingers opposed the appointment of extremist Arab politician Raja Zaatry as deputy mayor of Haifa, the left treated him as a political martyr. Haaretz editorialised that even if his views were “unpalatable to Israeli Jews”, he was nonetheless “elected democratically”. Demagoguery is not nobler for being Arab or baser for being Jewish.

I won’t allow Ben-Gvir’s presence in the government to dictate how I feel about Israel but nor will I ignore his bigotry. I encourage others to take the same stance. We should fight anti-Zionism as if there were no Ben-Gvir and fight Ben-Gvir as if there were no anti-Zionism.
Ironically, Ben-Gvir himself provides the reason to fight. Rather than signalling an Israeli turn to fascism, his electoral advance may prove the logical undoing of his ideology.

A sort of Mizrahi Homer Simpson, his doltishness and unschooled outbursts are attractions, not disqualifications, for Israeli Jews who have had it with the political and security establishments. They feel a precarity, symbolised by Israeli-Arab violence during last spring’s rocket attacks from Gaza, and they want someone in government who understands their unease.

That unease and the social factors that prompted it cannot be solved by Ben-Gvir because the answer they lead back to is one he rejects. That answer is a civic separation that ends the destructive entanglement of Israeli and Palestinian national life. That is, a two-state solution.

Only when Israel is no longer forced to be the sovereign of two nations will it finally feel sovereign in its own.