Israel’s far-right competes for votes with increasingly extreme visions

Far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir has made it a point to post videos of himself on social media taunting or mocking Palestinian prisoners. He boasted of threatening the most high-profile Palestinian prisoner. He showed off activists from a Gaza flotilla bound on the floor. And he is proud of a new law he pushed to expand the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terrorism. But as elections near, his messaging has grown more extreme. His latest AI-generated campaign video shows rows of numbered Palestinian prisoners in brown uniforms moving along a conveyor belt into a fenced compound with watchtowers; the inmates appear well-fed at the start and thinner and distressed after passing through the industrial-style processing line. The post says, “We promised - we delivered.” The video was removed from Ben Gvir’s account on X after amassing more than 4 million views. The minister has long called for conditions of Palestinian security prisoners to be reduced to “the minimum required by law.” Ben Gvir is perhaps the best known of Israel’s far-right politicians, a provocateur with his hands on the country’s levers of power. As the minister of National Security, he is in charge of the police and the prisons as his politics have become a defining feature of Israel’s image abroad. With two months until the elections, Israel’s far-right field is becoming increasingly crowded, packed with small parties vying for a finite pool of votes. To stand out, politicians are unabashed in their messaging and their vision for the country. The far-right is a dominant feature in Israeli politics – and a key component of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Political parties need to garner 3.25% of the vote to cross the electoral threshold and enter the next parliament. Those that fall short are excluded, and their votes effectively thrown out. That electoral arithmetic is intensifying competition for right-wing voters and pushing politicians to adopt even harder-line positions. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich repeatedly celebrates the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, openly boasting of destroying the possibility of a Palestinian state. A cornerstone of his election campaign is called “Yes. Let’s Judaize!” – a plan which aims to change the demographic reality in the Negev and Galilee, areas of Israel with substantial Arab populations, by applying settlement strategies from the West Bank: bringing a million additional Jewish residents and establishing about 40 new communities alongside dozens of individual farms. Meanwhile, Ofer Winter recently launched his new “Your People Israel” party. The retired brigadier general is popular among Israel’s right-wing and religious Zionist movement. At the party’s launch event in late-August, he said, “There will never be a Palestinian state here. The solution in Gaza is simple – emigration.” His party’s number two is Yoseph Haddad, an Arab Christian who is a pro-Israel activist and provocateur. Haddad, who has set his sights on becoming the minister of Public Diplomacy in the next government and the first Arab member of the Security Cabinet, said, “It is time the Arab community has representatives who work for them, not for Gaza, Jenin, and Ramallah. I hold them in contempt.” Avi Maoz, who leads the far-right “Noam” party, has railed against gay Pride parades in Jerusalem, secularism, and feminism. On his own, he is not expected to cross the electoral threshold. Nor is Moshe Feiglin’s “Identity” party. Feiglin, a veteran far-right libertarian political activist and occasional member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, has advocated for the destruction of Gaza and the “voluntary” emigration of Palestinians to third countries. “Every child in Gaza is the enemy,” he said last year on Israel’s Channel 14. “We need to occupy Gaza and settle it, and not a single Gazan child will be left there.” For Netanyahu, the abundance of far-right parties creates a real risk of losing tens of thousands of votes. If any of these parties fall under the electoral threshold, Netanyahu has warned that the right-wing risks losing the election. The prime minister has released several video and social media messages in recent weeks, publicly pleading with Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Winter to unite as one bloc instead of running as smaller parties. But so far, the right-wing parties are focusing on their own campaigns and leaning into a message that is becoming more extreme.