# Itamar Ben-Gvir Israeli politician, leader of the far-right **Otzma Yehudit** party, and **Minister of National Security** since December 2022 — the office with authority over the Israeli police. He is the political heir of [[Kahanism]] and the reason that tradition is a governing question rather than a historical one. ## Arc - A settler from Kiryat Arba near Hebron, active in Kahanist youth politics as a teenager. As a 19-year-old in October 1995 he appeared on television holding a Cadillac hood ornament taken from [[Yitzhak Rabin]]'s car, saying: "We got to his car, and we'll get to him too." Rabin was murdered weeks later. - The IDF **declined to draft him** on security grounds. - Practised as a defence lawyer for Jewish extremists accused of violence against Palestinians and of anti-state activity. - Kept a portrait of **Baruch Goldstein** — who murdered 29 worshippers in Hebron in 1994 — in his living room, removing it in 2020 as he moved toward electability. He has a long record of criminal convictions, including for incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organisation. - Entered the Knesset in 2021; Otzma Yehudit took **six seats** in 2022 and entered the coalition, with Ben-Gvir receiving an expanded national-security portfolio as the price. ## Why he matters to this vault Ben-Gvir is the endpoint of the sequence documented at [[Kahanism]]: a movement founded in Brooklyn, disqualified from Israeli elections as racist in 1988, outlawed as terrorist in 1994, and seated in cabinet in 2022. **No other case in this knowledge base compresses that transit into one lifetime, and none of the others has an American starting point.** He is also a live test of an argument the vault makes repeatedly about coalition arithmetic. Otzma Yehudit's six seats were not popular strength; they were **pivotal** strength in a chamber where 61 is a majority. The portfolio he received was proportionate to his leverage, not to his vote. ## See Also - [[Kahanism]] · [[Israeli History Hub]] · [[Zionism]] · [[Revisionist Zionism]] - [[Benjamin Netanyahu]] · [[Likud]] · [[Israel]] · [[Yitzhak Rabin]] - [[Ethnonationalism]] · [[Dictators in World History Hub]]