Swashbuckling and self-assured, Ben Gvir bulldozes nuance in pitch to English speakers

Yishai Fleisher, Itamar Ben Gvir’s English interpreter, put it best: “His messages were so simple.”

Indeed, at an English-language election event Monday night, the leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party was unmistakably uncomplicated. Describing a gamut of recent positive developments, from a drop in Palestinian terrorist attacks to the tumble in car insurance prices, he attributed them all to a single factor: himself.

Meanwhile, difficulties like the alarming rise in Jewish terrorist acts against Palestinians — reflected in the same IDF data that showed Palestinian attacks had gone down in 2025 — were “generally fake,” the national security minister said.

Other unflattering data, like the doubling in the annual homicide rate in Arab communities since he took office in late 2022, he said was the fault of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, whom he lambasted for nixing wiretaps and putting the kibosh on the use of indefinite detention without charge or systematic searches of Arab Israeli homes.

In any case, the killings affected “mainly crime families,” Ben Gvir claimed. And a slight decline in the number of Arab homicides over the past month was because, in spite of the attorney general, “we’ve started to bring the Shin Bet into handling crime in Arab society,” he added.

Hours earlier, 23-year-old Yasser A-Shawi was shot dead in Segev Shalom, and the next morning, 20-year-old Nimer Jabareen was shot dead in Umm al-Fahm.

Ben Gvir was addressing some 150 people hosted by the Tel Aviv International Salon, a nonpartisan educational organization that serves the city’s international community and has organized events with candidates from various parties ahead of the October 27 Knesset election.

The far-right leader has limited English, so he spoke in Hebrew, with line-by-line translation from Fleisher, the international spokesman for the Jewish settlement in Hebron and No. 12 on Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit slate.

Sporting a black vest, Fleisher riffed about the public relations tour he took to the US last year with Ben Gvir as the audience, a mix of supporters and the politically curious, waited for the main attraction to show up.

“His messages were so simple. Israel needs to have self-defense. Israelis need to have the ability to defend themselves, and the jihad cannot run amok,” Fleisher said. “In America, he would be called a Texan.”

Upon arrival, Ben Gvir danced with Fleisher to the tune of the 2010 faith-themed hit “Whoever Believes Is Unafraid” by Israeli pop star Eyal Golan, who has faced repeated allegations of sex offenses, and won Ben Gvir’s respect after State Attorney Amit Aisman launched a probe of the singer for urging Gaza’s destruction.

On the lapel of Ben Gvir’s vest was the minister’s regular accessory, a gold-colored pin in the shape of a noose. The brooch was a memento from a law pushed through the Knesset by Ben Gvir’s party mandating the death penalty for West Bank Palestinians convicted of deadly terrorist acts.

The measure was one of a litany of achievements he crowed about to the audience. Others included the massive expansion of gun ownership eligibility, the legally dubious cutting of rations for Palestinian inmates in security prisons, where the portly Ben Gvir joked his wife wants to send him, and the withdrawal of rules forbidding Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, ending a sensitive status quo arrangement with the site’s Muslim custodians.

Still, he didn’t lose sight of what was left to do in the next government, where he is gunning to be defense minister. His plan: “Occupy the entire Gaza Strip, because it’s all ours… and encourage emigration” of Palestinians from there and from the West Bank.

Missing in Ben Gvir’s election pitch was any definitive statement in the lower-decibel realm of economic policy. Instead, he and Fleisher both touted recent official data showing drops in auto theft and car insurance rates as proof the minister’s pugnacious approach to law enforcement was also a boon to voters’ bank accounts.

What they neglected to say was that the discount wasn’t the result of fewer cars getting boosted, but a state regulator in November issuing an unprecedented order to Israel’s largest insurers demanding they cut rates or lose the right to sell policies.

The absence of nuance in his stump speech was of a piece with Ben Gvir’s campaign thus far, which has attempted to whip up support through short-form videos that trade on the visceral: Ben Gvir on a bulldozer razing Bedouin homes built without a permit; Ben Gvir in a prison, telling both terror convicts and his suspected would-be assassins that he wants to put them to death; Ben Gvir’s police cracking down on an Arab prisoner’s release party, an Arab couple’s henna ceremony, an Arab university’s graduation event and an Arab political party’s motorcycle convoy.

A band of TikTokers have replicated the minister’s brash tactics, putting out clips of themselves blocking government critics’ way, picketing their homes and calling them antisemites. A few of these young men were on hand at Monday’s event to cheer loudly from the back row.

Some of Ben Gvir’s own videos have been removed after the Central Elections Committee reprimanded him for use of state facilities for electioneering.

In one such video from last month, Ben Gvir told Hassan Salamah — who was responsible for a pair of 1996 Jerusalem bus bombings that killed 45 people — “I want to kill you” and that he was responsible for making Salamah’s life “hell.”

That video was at the heart of what Ben Gvir said was a story related by a Givatayim rabbi “that moved me greatly.”

In the minister’s telling, the rabbi had a Holocaust survivor in his synagogue who had seen the video and asked him, “If you ever see Itamar Ben Gvir, tell him I’m so proud… I’ve waited my whole life for the person who will come to the terrorists and give them hell.”

He concluded his remarks: “We are proud Jews. We love the country. We want to win, win, win. Am Yisrael Chai.”