Ben Gvir said looking to appoint driver who crashed his car as personal assistant
Moshe Eichenstein had license revoked for allegedly running red light in April crash in which 5 people were injured; national security minister said aiming to hire him at ministry
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir is reportedly working to promote his driver, who injured five people when he flipped the minister’s official government vehicle in the central city of Ramle in April, to be his personal assistant.
The driver, Moshe Eichenstein, had his license revoked for 60 days after allegedly causing the accident by entering an intersection on a red light after leaving the scene of a terror attack that Ben Gvir went to visit.
Road officials and police investigators believe there is enough evidence to press charges against him for traffic offenses.
But the Haaretz newspaper reported on Thursday that Ben Gvir has recently been working to hire him as a National Security Ministry employee until charges are filed.
Video from the scene appeared to show Ben Gvir’s convoy running the red light. Pictures showed the minister’s black official vehicle flipped over, while another car had a smashed-in front.
The minister, one of his daughters, a guard and his driver were injured in the crash, along with the driver of the other vehicle. Hebrew media reported that Ben Gvir and his daughter were not wearing seatbelts.
The driver whose vehicle was hit by the minister’s car, Idan Domatov, has said in multiple Hebrew media interviews that his life has been ruined by the accident, as he undergoes a long and difficult recovery.
There was no comment from the minister on the report.
Ben Gvir, who himself has a long history of traffic offenses and has been repeatedly slammed for filming himself in transit as a minister while not wearing a seatbelt, has maintained that Eichenstein was not responsible for the accident.
Haaretz quoted security guards for Ben Gvir last month as saying that his drivers continue to break traffic laws under his instruction, even after the accident in Ramle.
Guards quoted in the previous Haaretz report said that even if there was no operational need to do so, the drivers drive at excessive speeds, run red lights and drive on the hard shoulder of the road.
The Thursday Haaretz report cited police sources as saying that employing Eichenstein as the minister’s personal assistant would be tantamount to a promotion.
The report also noted that another former Ben Gvir driver, Natan Singer, who also allegedly ran a red light and caused a car accident in Jerusalem in August last year, had also been promoted while being investigated, though he was ultimately not charged.
The Kan broadcaster reported last year that since Ben Gvir began driving in 2000, he has been caught running red lights, using his phone while driving, speeding, crossing solid white lines and driving without a seatbelt, among a list of 78 infractions.
“He drives around like he’s the prime minister. There’s no chance he’ll sit around in traffic,” an unnamed source told Haaretz in a previous report.
In response to the Kan report, Ben Gvir claimed that the Israel Police had compensated him with NIS 25,000 ($6,500) for wrongful arrests and that his infractions “became obsolete years ago.”
The minister has been indicted dozens of times, mostly for disturbing the peace during his time as a far-right activist, though he was exonerated in almost all the cases. The Jerusalem District Court in 2008 convicted him of incitement to racism and supporting a terror organization over a placard he held reading “Arabs out” following a Palestinian terror attack in Jerusalem and anti-Arab signs he had in his car that referred to the far-right Kach movement, a Jewish group that was banned as a terror organization.
In coalition talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he demanded and received authority over the police after being elected to the Knesset in 2023, after running a campaign in which he promised to restore law and order.
