Once deemed a pariah in Israel’s political arena, extreme-right leader Itamar Ben-Gvir may play a decisive role in the country’s upcoming election.
With his round glasses and white kippa placed crookedly atop his greying hair, 46-year-old Ben-Gvir presents an affable figure.
But to his detractors, the lawyer turned lawmaker is a pyromaniac whose politics threaten to set the country ablaze.
“I’ve changed,” he told AFP from a palatial apartment in Tel Aviv. “When I said 20 years ago that I wanted to expel all the Arabs, I don’t think that anymore. But I will not apologise.”
Elected to parliament in April 2021, Ben-Gvir heads the Jewish Power party and has spent years campaigning for the extreme right.
His platform includes supporting the Israeli annexation of the occupied West Bank, home to 2.8 million Palestinians, and the forcible transfer of some of the country’s Arab-Israeli population.
In his youth, Ben-Gvir was charged more than 50 times for incitement to violence or hate speech. He boasts that he got off 46 times and studied law on the recommendation of judges, to learn how to defend himself.
Now one of the most prominent figures in Israeli politics, the father-of-six lives in a radical settlement in the West Bank and frequently appears at scenes of tension in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
 ‘Save the country’
Just weeks ahead of the November 1 election, he brandished a gun in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, amid clashes between Palestinian residents and Israeli forces and citizens.
The next day, Ben-Gvir published a photo standing beside two of his children, holding toy guns.
“After the riots… I’m teaching the children how to act with terrorists,” he wrote on Twitter.
The extreme-right leader also appears frequently at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, known to Jews as Temple Mount, shouting: “the people of Israel live!”
The compound, the most sacred site in Judaism and the third-holiest site in Islam, is the epicentre of tensions in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Ben-Gvir, whose chin is often peppered with stubble, argues he is “here to save the country”.
“I’m at war with the jihadists and those who want to attack the country.”
As a lawyer, Ben-Gvir represented Israeli clients such as settlers accused of violence. They included those implicated in the 2015 firebombing of a Palestinian home in the West Bank, which killed a baby and his parents.
There is no such thing as a Palestinian people for Ben-Gvir, who speaks of an “existential crisis for the survival of the Jewish people”.
He is winning supporters nationwide, as part of an extreme-right alliance with Bezalel Smotrich.
Polls predict the duo will pick up 13 seats in the upcoming election, nearly doubling their current seven.
Such success would likely hand them the third-biggest alliance in parliament, potentially putting Ben-Gvir in prime position as leaders jostle to form a coalition.
In exchange for the support of Jewish Power, opposition chief and former premier Benjamin Netanyahu could offer a ministerial post.
‘Feeds on fear’Â
Yossi Klein Halevi, a researcher at Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute, said Ben-Gvir would push for the justice or public security portfolio.
Such a platform would put him “in charge of keeping law and order, and making sure there is continual upheaval and tension and hatred on the streets,” said Klein Halevi.
Ben-Gvir’s path to political influence has, however, seen him tone down some of his messages. Instead of “death to Arabs!”, Ben-Gvir now chants “death to terrorists!”
Born in the Jerusalem suburbs to Sephardic parents, his anti-Arab rhetoric was inspired by the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane whose Kach movement Ben-Gvir campaigned for.
Kach was banned in Israel after Baruch Goldstein, a Kahane sympathiser, killed 29 Palestinian worshippers at a mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron.
Ben-Gvir, who lives in Hebron, used to hang a portrait of Goldstein in his living room, but took it down as he entered the politics.
According to Klein Halevi, the leader of the extreme-right has been “faking a political makeover”.
He is “pretending that he’s now, if not quite moderate, at least a respectable hardliner,” said the researcher, who has authored a book about his own past attraction to Jewish extremism as a teenager.
“He is not, it’s a lie … He’s the demagogue who feeds on fear, frustration and anger.”