Leo Arpishkin

A little more than three years ago, in the days leading up to October 7, 2023, I started drafting a piece that was never published. As The Jerusalem Post’s editor-in-chief, I oversaw the paper’s daily editorials, unsigned opinion pieces expressing the view of the editorial staff on the issues of the day. Each morning, I would discuss potential topics and positions with the editor assigned to write the next day’s piece, then review, edit, and sign off on the draft prior to publication. Once a week or so, I wrote the editorial myself, generally pondering the topic for several days unless breaking news forced my hand. Atypically, in the case in question, I knew what I wanted to title the editorial before it was even written: “Ben-Gvir Must Go.” Calling for the dismissal of a senior government minister is not a decision to be taken lightly. Journalists, no matter how critical of the government they or their publications may be, rely on relationships with officials at all levels to do their jobs. I worried that we might jeopardize our reporters’ access to important sources, particularly in ministries controlled by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his far-right Otzma Yehudit party, impairing their ability to serve the public and inform the national conversation. But I decided that we needed to take a stand nonetheless. In the months prior, we had published a series of editorials increasingly critical of Ben-Gvir and of his utter failure to do his job as the minister responsible for law enforcement. In April of that year, we said that putting him in charge of a newly formed National Guard should be a “nonstarter.” In June, we wrote that, if he continued engaging in inflammatory stunts rather than dedicating himself to fighting a wave of deadly violence sweeping through Israel’s Arab community, he ought to step down. In August, we called his racist attacks on Arab Israeli journalist Mohammed Magadli “abhorrent” and “appalling.” In September, we slammed his attempts to undermine due process and ease prison conditions for Amiram Ben-Uliel, convicted of murdering three members of a Palestinian family, including an infant. In my own weekly columns, published each Friday, I took Ben-Gvir to task for modeling racist extremism to Israel’s teens, attempting to undermine non-Orthodox conversions, helping foster an atmosphere of hostility toward Israel’s LGBT community, and doing little to prevent acts of murder among the country’s Arab citizens. “Arab lives matter, too, and unless Ben-Gvir comes to accept that and treat the murder of a boy in Rahat or Taibe as he would the murder of a boy in Karnei Shomron or Petah Tikva, he needs to make way for someone who will,” I wrote that August. But as passions swirled in the months and weeks leading up to October 7, my concerns about Ben-Gvir grew beyond his inflammatory rhetoric and abysmal performance in office. Time and again, he demonstrated contempt for the restraints that govern the exercise of state power, seeking to bend law enforcement institutions to his will and attacking those who stood in his way. At one of the most sensitive moments in Israel’s history, his conduct had become a threat to the rule of law and to the institutions he had sworn to protect. It could no longer be left up to him, I decided; we needed to call on Prime Minister Netanyahu to let him go. I planned to publish the call in the next Friday paper, the most widely read issue of the week, on October 13. Six days before it was to appear, Hamas invaded southern Israel. The horrors of October 7 gripped our collective attention for days, weeks, and then months, leaving little room — in our minds or on our pages — for anything else. The war expanded to additional fronts and we became consumed by its impact on every facet of our lives. I left the Post. The piece never ran. For three years, though, those four words — Ben-Gvir must go — have echoed through my mind. His conduct throughout this period has only strengthened the conviction behind them. Now, with days to go until Israel heads to the polls, it is time to say them out loud. Much has been made of the damage Ben-Gvir’s behavior and his very presence in the cabinet cause Israel’s reputation on a daily basis. His name has become shorthand for crude extremism, and the fact that he is a senior minister is held up as proof that his noxious views are somehow representative of Israeli society, despite his party holding only six of the Knesset’s 120 seats. As someone who engages regularly with audiences around the world, most of them predominantly Jewish and pro-Israel, I cannot recall the last time a Q&A session did not include at least one pointed question about Ben-Gvir, the way his awful statements and outlandish conduct reflect on Israel, and the shame and embarrassment he causes some of the Jewish state’s most devoted supporters. But the problem with Ben-Gvir isn’t merely that he makes Israel look bad, though he certainly does. The problem is the Israel he is trying to forge in his own image — a dark place that would be utterly unrecognizable. It is tempting to dismiss his antics as publicity stunts meant to appeal to a certain type of voter, as though he is perpetually in campaign mode. His provocations have ranged from having himself filmed taunting bound Gaza flotilla activists and Palestinian prisoners to wearing a noose lapel pin and celebrating his birthday with gallows- and gun-themed cakes to promote his effort to impose the death penalty on Palestinian terrorists; and from dancing at a conference calling for the emigration of Gaza’s Palestinian residents and the reestablishment of Israeli communities in the territory to announcing plans to surround a prison holding Palestinian security prisoners with a crocodile-filled moat. But beneath this gruesome spectacle lies a disturbing worldview that is racist, thuggish, supremacist, and cruel. An acolyte of Meir Kahane — the American-born rabbi convicted of terrorism-related charges in the U.S. and banned from the Knesset for his incitement to anti-Arab racism — Ben-Gvir has never been one to conceal his views. “We had a prophet in our midst, a leader among us, and we walk in his footsteps,” he said in 2016, referring to Kahane. Until 2020, a portrait of Baruch Goldstein — another Kahane disciple who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994 — hung on his living room wall. He had previously displayed signs reading “Expel the Arab enemy.” Also in 2016, he declared that LGBT people “have no place neither in Jerusalem nor anywhere else in the State of Israel.” He backed a suggestion by fellow extremist (and current fellow cabinet member) Bezalel Smotrich that Jewish and Arab women should be separated in maternity wards and added he would require pregnant Arab women to take loyalty oaths. And lest anyone suspect that his entry into electoral politics reflected a moderation of his views, Ben-Gvir himself dispelled the notion: “My style has changed, but the ideology is the same ideology,” he said in 2019. The form is the substance, and it has been ever since Ben-Gvir went on national television as a 19-year-old to display an emblem stolen from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac and crow that “we got to his car, and we’ll get to him too” (Rabin was murdered by another far-right extremist, Yigal Amir, several weeks later). Between 1993 and 2007, he was indicted on 15 criminal charges, including incitement to violence, possession of terrorist propaganda, and support for a terrorist organization. He was convicted of 13. One might argue — erroneously, in my view — that Ben-Gvir’s antics, his criminal past, his noxious views, and the damage he causes Israel’s image would be tolerable if he were good at his job. But the truth is that he has been an abject failure. As minister of national security, he has presided over a surge in violent crime not seen in decades. During his time in office, the number of homicide victims has more than doubled, from 148 in 2022 — approximately 1.5 homicides per 100,000 residents — to 309 in 2025, or approximately 3.0 per 100,000 residents. The disparity in homicide rates between Arab and Jewish Israelis widened considerably, from 10:1 to 14:1, after Ben-Gvir terminated a program created by the previous government to prevent violent crime in Arab communities, which had caused the murder rate to decline. When asked about the wave of murders among Arab Israelis, Ben-Gvir said that the “greater danger” was that it could “spill over into the Jewish sector” and that weapons held by Arab citizens “could be directed at us on command.” Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir has repeatedly sought to bend the police to his political will. He attempted to remove Tel Aviv’s police commander amid disagreements over the handling of anti-government protests, prompting the attorney general to intervene. The Supreme Court has repeatedly had to restrain his interference in operational policing decisions, particularly concerning demonstrations, and struck down a legislative provision granting him expanded authority over criminal investigations. His attempts to influence police appointments and promotions have raised serious concerns that officers’ careers could depend less on their professional judgment than on their willingness to do his bidding. Ben-Gvir’s indulgence of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank has been particularly egregious. He has characterized attacks on Palestinians as a “marginal” phenomenon — contradicting the heads of the IDF, the Shin Bet, and the Israel Police, who jointly warned about the threat they pose — and reportedly called their perpetrators “sweet kids.” As the attacks have escalated, police investigations have declined sharply. Senior officers have also faced allegations of deliberately failing to pursue Jewish terrorism suspects in an effort to curry favor with the minister. Only a third of Israelis now say they have high trust in the police. Israelis also report lower levels of personal safety, with a quarter saying they don’t feel comfortable walking alone after dark. Three-quarters of Israelis say they believe police decisions are influenced by political pressure, rather than purely professional considerations. Ben-Gvir is not a bull in a china shop; a bull cannot control its actions. He is a hooligan with a baseball bat, gleefully smashing every democratic norm, every Jewish value, every standard of decency, and every foundation of the state whose citizens he is supposed to protect. Elsewhere, a minister who had failed so resoundingly at his job, and whose tenure had caused his country so much damage, would have been sacked long ago. Having appointed Ben-Gvir to a critical and sensitive ministerial post for which he was grossly ill-suited, and having assembled a governing coalition of which Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party is an indispensable part, Prime Minister Netanyahu has adamantly refused to let him go, going so far as to defend his continued tenure in court. That he granted a convicted criminal control over the country’s law enforcement bodies, that he has allowed himself and his government to be held hostage by him, that he has staked his political fate on his band of extremists, and that he has permitted him to run amok during one of the most fateful periods in Israel’s history will be a mark of shame on Netanyahu’s premiership. He, too, bears responsibility for Ben-Gvir’s disastrous term in office. Itamar Ben-Gvir’s record has demonstrated not merely that he is unfit for his current position, but that he should never again be entrusted with the authority of public office. His continued presence in Israel’s government poses a threat to Israeli democracy. Netanyahu may have opened the door to Ben-Gvir and his ilk, but now it falls to us to close it. When I enter the polling booth on Tuesday, my vote will be shaped not only by my opposition to Ben-Gvir and everything he stands for, but also by my conviction that he must play no role at all in Israel’s next government. I will not cast my ballot for any party willing to form a coalition with Otzma Yehudit or to enable Ben-Gvir to hold a ministerial post once again, and I urge other Israeli voters to do the same. It is time to put this ugly chapter behind us. Yes, Ben-Gvir must go. ----- Yes, Ben-Gvir Must Go Jerusalem Journal October 23, 2026 Link in the first threaded tweet