The Netanyahu-Ben Gvir Playbook, Thirty Years Later
The method is the same. What changed is who is in power.
Lucy Aharish is Channel 13’s prime-time news anchor. She is the first Arab Muslim news presenter on mainstream Hebrew-language Israeli television. Her husband, Tsahi Halevi, is the star of Fauda. He is also a reservist who fought in the border communities on October 7 and is credited with saving dozens of lives.
In February, a man named Mordechai David showed up outside the Tel Aviv apartment building where they live. He came with a megaphone. Then he came back. And back. Five nights in a row, he and others stood outside the building chanting “may your village burn,” “Lucy you’re a whore,” and “leftists are traitors.” On the first night, Halevi confronted them outside the building as their five-year-old son was being put to bed inside. The child heard the mob and asked his mother why people were yelling at the door. Aharish later canceled a planned trip to the United States to deliver the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at Stanford. Judea Pearl took her place and said publicly that the reason was the harassment. Weeks later, the ADL gave her its Abraham Award.
None of this is new. We have seen this playbook before.
In October 1995, a 19-year-old activist stood in front of the television cameras holding a Cadillac hood ornament he had torn off the official car of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He wore a light blue t-shirt and an oversized kippa, his left arm in a sling. He smiled slightly.
A reporter asked him what the ornament meant.
“A hood ornament is a symbol,” he said. “And this symbolizes that, just like we got to this hood ornament, we can get to Rabin.”
Three weeks later, Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv.
The young man’s name was Itamar Ben Gvir. He was a leader of Kach, the Kahanist movement outlawed as a terrorist organization by both the Israeli and American governments. He did not disappear after Rabin’s assassination. He became a defense attorney for Jewish terrorists — most notoriously, the man convicted of firebombing a Palestinian family's home and murdering an 18-month-old child and his parents. He hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein — the American-born doctor who massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in Hebron in 1994 — in his living room.
A year after the massacre, he dressed up as Goldstein for Purim, on camera, and told the reporter: “There are people who dress up as Mordechai the Jew, there are people who dress up as Queen Esther. My hero is Dr. Goldstein.”
He was indicted 53 times and convicted on charges including incitement to racism and support for a terror organization. In 2022, after Benjamin Netanyahu brought him into the coalition, he became Minister of National Security.
He is currently the minister responsible for the Israeli Police.
The method Mordechai David is using in 2026 — surround the car, perform for the camera, mark the target — is the method Ben Gvir pioneered in 1995.
The method is the same. In 1995, the state opposed it. Now the state sponsors it.
This is not new either. In January 2017, as IDF soldier Elor Azaria was being convicted of manslaughter for executing a wounded Palestinian attacker in Hebron, demonstrators outside the military court in Tel Aviv chanted “Gadi, be careful, Rabin is looking for a friend” — a threat against IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, who had refused to abandon the prosecution.
Eisenkot is now leader of the Yashar party, and the same milieu still treats him as a traitor — even after losing his son and two nephews in the Gaza war. The chanters in 2017 came from the same political world Ben Gvir came out of. Some were investigated by police. Others now hold ministerial office or work under those who do. Mark the target. Invoke Rabin. Let the threat carry itself. The method has been continuous. What changed is who is in power.
In September 2024, Ben Gvir hosted Mordechai David in his Knesset office. The two embraced on camera. Ben Gvir praised David for “protesting, and shouting, and demonstrating.” David uploaded four videos of the meeting to his social media accounts. Across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and X, he has a combined following of roughly 182,000 people, with individual videos reaching millions of views.
Justice Minister and architect of the controversial judicial reform Yariv Levin has also hosted David in his office.
In January, David was outside a conference in Tel Aviv where Aharon Barak had just finished speaking. Barak is 89 years old, a Holocaust survivor, Israel’s preeminent living jurist, a former president of the Supreme Court. In 2024, Netanyahu’s own government asked him to represent Israel as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice.
At the conference — the Movement for Quality Government’s first Liberal Congress — Barak told the audience that institutions do not collapse overnight: they erode “law by law, appointment by appointment, norm by norm.” Minutes later, as his daughter drove him away, David and a masked mob surrounded the car. David opened the car door, pushed his phone into the back seat, and filmed himself calling Barak “the Khamenei of our generation.” He added: “Fortunately for us, his generation has passed. We are the new generation, the generation of the messianic age.”
The day after, Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman — who notably broke off from Bennett’s party to bring down Israel’s last coalition — posted on X: “Thank you to the wonderful Mordechai David for peeling back the hypocrisy. Simply wonderful.” Three sitting ministers of the Netanyahu government have now personally legitimized the man on the record. Beyond the cabinet, Channel 14 — the Netanyahu-aligned network — has featured David repeatedly and its hosts have praised him.
David first built his following by harassing hostage family demonstrations and anti-government protests — his group, Brothers for Justice, existed for that purpose. He holds a standing restraining order from the home of Democrats MK Gilad Kariv, and another from the home of Standing Together national co-director Alon-Lee Green, after showing up at Green’s apartment building, banging on his door, and demanding he come out. He confronted MK Naama Lazimi at the Knesset. He was questioned last year for allegedly threatening Channel 12 correspondent Guy Peleg. And on Saturday night, he followed Democrats leader Yair Golan in the street, calling him a coward and a nobody, with bystanders intervening before police arrived.
The police under Ben Gvir’s authority opened an investigation into the Aharon Barak incident. They canceled it. They reopened it under public pressure. David was questioned and released on his own recognizance with a 30-day order barring him from contacting anyone involved. He violated it within three weeks, standing outside Aharish’s building with a megaphone. No consequence followed.
The apparatus is not keeping this in check. It is enabling it.
In August 2024, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar warned Netanyahu and the cabinet that settler extremism was growing because of “a sense of secret backing”from police. Ben Gvir demanded Bar be fired. Bar has since been replaced.
This week, the Supreme Court held a ten-hour hearing on four petitions to remove Ben Gvir from office. The Attorney General backs the petitions. Justice Minister Levin — David’s former host — has announced that the government will not recognize any ruling to remove a minister. Ben Gvir has announced he will “blow up” any conduct agreement the court imposes.
There is an obvious objection. It will come from people who want to defend the coalition, and from those who want to believe both sides are equally responsible. The objection is that this kind of thing happens on the left too. Protesters have blocked the Ayalon. Activists have gotten in politicians’ faces. It is uncomfortable when they do it, and it should be.
The objection is wrong for specific reasons.
What the anti-judicial overhaul movement did in 2023 — tens of thousands of Israelis shutting down the Ayalon to protest a legislative package — was mass civil disobedience. It was disruptive and it was disobedient. It was also aimed at a policy, conducted in public, and organized around a specific political demand. That is a traditional form of protest in a democracy. What Mordechai David is doing is not that.
He is running a campaign of individual harassment against opposition figures, judges, journalists, and their families, with the personal sponsorship of three cabinet ministers. Left-wing activists who harass right-wing figures are not hosted in Knesset offices. They are not publicly thanked by ministers. When they cross a line, the police under Ben Gvir arrest them quickly and prosecute them thoroughly. The asymmetry is the everyday operation of the ministry — from the minister’s office down to the street.
The targets are also different. Left-wing protest in Israel, at its most confrontational, targets the sitting government over its policies. That is the ordinary business of democracy. Mordechai David is not protesting policy: he is running a campaign to remove specific people from public life — an 89-year-old retired judge, a former prime minister, an Arab journalist and her five-year-old child, opposition members of Knesset.
And there is the historical record. There is no Yigal Amir on the Israeli left. Rabin was killed by a man who came out of the same political milieu Ben Gvir came out of, three weeks after Ben Gvir’s performance with the hood ornament. Critics who ask whether the left’s version is the same have an answer already. We know where the right’s version ends. The country has been there.
It is tempting to treat Mordechai David as a fringe figure whose prominence is being manufactured by sympathetic ministers. That is half right. The ministers are amplifying him. But he is not fringe.
Otzma Yehudit won six seats in 2022. Religious Zionism, the joint list it ran on, won fourteen. That is roughly eleven percent of the Knesset — a real constituency, not a fringe, but not a majority. No serious poll in the past year has shown Netanyahu’s coalition able to reassemble a governing majority.
A clear majority of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign. Ben Gvir’s personal favorability is low in almost every poll. The specific use of ministerial power to sponsor Mordechai David — to host him in a Knesset office, to thank him publicly, to decline to enforce restraining orders against him — was not on any ballot. It is a choice and a statement.
Ben Gvir is popular among younger Israelis. A poll conducted for first-time voters put Ben Gvir’s party at 14 seats without Smotrich — more than double what he currently has. But consider what Israelis now in their twenties and early thirties have actually lived through.
They were in elementary school during the Second Intifada. They came of age under rockets from Gaza. They grew up with terror attacks, rockets, and wars on multiple fronts. And then October 7. For a generation formed by this security environment, Ben Gvir is the politician who speaks the loudest to what some of them feel. He has also, separately, mastered the platforms where their politics happen — his TikTok following is second only to Netanyahu’s among Israeli politicians.
That appeal is real. It is also contingent. A generation formed by trauma responds to the politician who speaks loudest to the fear. Netanyahu and Ben Gvir have done more than speak to it — they have built a politics around keeping it alive.
Netanyahu’s politics have always been fear politics. Fear of Arab citizens. Fear of the left. Fear of the judiciary. Fear of anyone who might check his power. Ben Gvir has made it more extreme and more explicit.
Young Israelis have lived through real threats. They are now being told by the most powerful politicians in the country that internal enemies are everywhere. The left, the center, and the responsible right have largely failed to offer them a different story.
Israel has real enemies. It doesn’t need to turn its own people against each other. That may be the greatest threat of them all.
On October 5, 1995, Likud organized a rally at Zion Square in Jerusalem. One hundred thousand people attended. Protesters held posters showing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in an SS uniform. The crowd chanted “death to Rabin.” On the balcony above the square stood the leader of the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu. Other Likud figures — Benny Begin, David Levy, Dan Meridor — left when they saw what the rally had become. Netanyahu stayed.
Before that rally, Shin Bet chief Carmi Gillon had warned Netanyahu directly that there was a plot on Rabin’s life and asked him to moderate the rhetoric of the protests. Netanyahu declined.
A month later, Rabin was assassinated.
The man who presided over that climate in 1995 is presiding over this one. He is also, now, a criminal defendant. Netanyahu is on trial for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. His political survival is welded to the coalition he has built, and that coalition is built on Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Elections must take place by the end of October. When they come, Netanyahu may lose the immunity that being prime minister provides, and his trial will accelerate. Even if Netanyahu wanted to curb Ben Gvir — and there is no evidence he does — the structural logic of his legal situation prevents it. He cannot afford to break with the faction that is the source of the problem. He can only try to hold the coalition together with the hope of reelection in October.
Every week this apparatus operates unchecked is a week in which the argument for a better Israel gets harder to make — not only to outsiders, but to ourselves.
The remedy in Israeli democracy, when the apparatus is corrupted, has always been the ballot. The window described in an earlier piece — the one that was still open but would not stay open forever — is closing in real time, not metaphorically. The apparatus will not correct itself. The Supreme Court cannot fire Ben Gvir if the government refuses to recognize the ruling. The only lever left is the one Israelis will hold in their hands six months from now.