The world recoiled in horror this week as Israel's far-right minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, personally administered abuse to international activists detained and tortured by his government after intercepting their life-saving flotilla mission to Gaza.
Western foreign ministers made strongly worded statements. The UK's Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper summoned the Israeli ambassador, demanding an 'explanation', apparently shocked by his behaviour, though less so perturbed by the genocide in Gaza.
Yet behind this pantomime of faux outrage and boutique sanctions on Israeli settler extremists, lies a deliberate denial of the true nature of Israel, its bad behaviour conveniently blamed on repulsive villains like Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich .
However, it is not difficult for anyone who has followed recent years of Israeli brutality to see that Ben-Gvir and his ilk are not marginal figures in Israeli politics but now its most visible expressions.
The question is not whether Ben-Gvir is extreme. It is why he unsettles so many, including Israeli ministers in the very coalition in which he holds a senior portfolio. If Ben-Gvir “does not represent Israel”, as Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar claimed a few days ago, then who does?
What, in practice, separates Saar or other mainstream Israeli political figures from Ben-Gvir when it comes to Palestinians?
On settlement expansion, disproportionate military force, collective punishment, siege tactics, forced dispossession, and the war in Gaza, the distinctions are difficult to discern. They are not differences of principle, but of style, language, and presentation.
Ben-Gvir is deemed grotesque not because he invented Israeli violence, but because he has stripped it of its decorum. But neither Saar nor anyone else in Israel’s political establishment has the right to feign surprise.
For decades, Israel’s political and security elites sustained a careful division. On one side stood the image Israel worked tirelessly to project to the world: a liberal democracy, technologically advanced, environmentally conscious, open, modern, and governed by the rule of law. On the other stood the reality imposed on Palestinians: military rule, settlement expansion, land theft, checkpoints, home demolitions, industrial scale incarceration, and a separate legal order designed to manage an occupied and colonised people.
This separation was never merely legal, though legal duality was central to it. It extended into every sphere of life. Israel celebrated its press freedom while Palestinian journalists were routinely killed, arrested, harassed, and surveilled.
It boasted of public safety and sophisticated policing while Palestinian communities were abandoned to organised crime or exposed directly to state and settler violence.
It marketed itself as a green and environmentally responsible state while Palestinian land was turned into dumping grounds and subjected to systematic ecological destruction.
It promoted Tel Aviv liberalism as a symbol of openness while imposing control over every intimate aspect of Palestinian life.
This has been the logic of Israeli apartheid: domination and meticulous management of the domination’s image.
For a long time, this arrangement served Israel well. It allowed its allies to speak of “shared values” while supplying weapons. It allowed Western journalists to describe Israeli politics as complicated while treating Palestinian death as background noise. It allowed liberal Zionists to lament “excesses” while remaining committed to the structures that produced them. Above all, it allowed Israeli elites to imagine that the violence required to sustain a settler-colonial regime could be kept at a distance, contained beyond the apartheid wall, checkpoints, and borders designed to separate Palestinians from Israeli life.
But colonial violence rarely remains where it is assigned. The monsters, as centuries of colonial history have shown, have a habit of coming back home to roost. Ben-Gvir as a structural inevitabile phenemonen The state of exception Israel created for Palestinians, the suspension of law, accountability, restraint, and equal human worth, has steadily expanded inward. What was once justified as necessary in the occupied territories has become a broader political culture inside Israel proper. Contempt for legal limits, the glorification of force, and the open celebration of domination have reformulated Israeli society.
Ben-Gvir is a product of this return. He belongs to a newer Israeli political and security class whose power comes not from concealing state violence, but from flaunting it . His political persona is built on a refusal to speak the language of restraint. He does not bother with the polished vocabulary of “self-defence”, “security concerns”, or “difficult choices” that has long enabled Israel to present its violence as reluctant, necessary, and defensible to Western audiences. Instead, he turns the underlying logic of Israeli rule into spectacle.
That is why he is both useful and threatening to Israel. He is useful because he mobilises forces that have long existed in Israeli society: settler supremacy, armed machoism, and the fantasy of total control over Palestinian life. He is threatening because he exposes those forces too openly. He makes it harder for Israel’s defenders to sustain the fiction that the problem lies with a handful of extremists rather than with state policy itself.
This is also why the Western framing of Ben-Gvir as an exception is so politically convenient. By isolating him as a rogue figure, Israel’s allies can preserve the image of a fundamentally reasonable state temporarily hijacked by extremists. The problem becomes Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric, not the siege of Gaza; his provocations, not the system of apartheid; his personal vulgarity, not the decades-long political order that made him possible.
But Ben-Gvir did not fall from the sky. He is not an aberration. He is the outcome of policies, institutions, and ideological commitments that long preceded him. Even Israelis who dislike him recognise this. Their fear is not that he represents a total rupture with Israel’s past, but that he makes its continuity impossible to deny. He collapses the distance between the state and the settler mob, between the cabinet table and the pogrom, between the language of national security and the language of ethnic supremacy.
His rise marks a shift from an older Israeli logic of denial, liberal performance, and managed brutality. What replaces it is not a new approach towards Palestinians, but a more direct and unabashed one.
Ben-Gvir is not the opposite of Israel’s political tradition but is what happens when that tradition no longer feels compelled to disguise itself. Izzeddin Araj is a Palestinian journalist and researcher. He is the Executive Director of Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Arabic network Ultra Sawt. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from The Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID). Follow Izzeddin on X: @ArajIzzeddin Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.