Itamar Ben-Gvir

Who is Itamar Ben-Gvir?

Itamar Ben-Gvir was born in Mevaseret Zion. His father was born in Jerusalem to Iraqi Jewish immigrants. He worked at a gasoline company and dabbled in writing. His mother was a Kurdish Jewish immigrant who had been active in the Irgun as a teenager and was a homemaker. His family was secular, but as a teenager he adopted religious and radical right-wing views during the First Intifada. He first joined a right-wing youth movement affiliated with Moledet, a party which advocated transferring Arabs out of Israel, and then joined the youth movement of the even more radical Kach and Kahane Chai party, which was eventually designated as a terrorist organization and outlawed by the Israeli government. He became youth coordinator of Kach, and claimed that he was detained at age 14. When he came of age for conscription into the Israel Defense Forces at 18, he was exempted from service by the IDF due to his extreme-right political background.

Ben-Gvir continued to be associated with the Kahanist movement, of which his party, Otzma Yehudit, is said to be one of the ideological successors to Kahane. In the 1990s, he was active in protests against the Oslo Accords. In 1995, a few weeks before the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Ben-Gvir came to public attention for the first time when he appeared on television brandishing a Cadillac emblem that had been stolen from Rabin's car and declared: "We got to his car, and we'll get to him too." However, when forming the Otzma Yehudit party, he claimed that it would not be a Kach Kahane Chai or splinter group. He carried out a series of far-right activities that have resulted in dozens of indictments. In a November 2015 interview, he claimed to have been indicted 53 times. In most cases, the charges were thrown out of court. In 2007, however, he was convicted for incitement to racism.