Published: 2 December 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
The presence of ultranationalists in Israel's government is a gift to BDS and damages the national interests of Jews worldwide. Diaspora Jews must work to oppose them.
Last Friday, the Likud signed an agreement with the Kahanist party, Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), to give it an expanded range of responsibilities in the new government, covering the Public Security Ministry, the Development Ministry for the Negev and Galilee and a Jewish Heritage Ministry.
It is likely that Itamar Ben-Gvir will now run the Israeli police. He has moved from the periphery, as a participant in the incitement against Yitzhak Rabin before his assassination and part of the far-Right community of activists from which Yigal Amir emerged, to the heart of government.
The new representatives of Otzma Yehudit in the Knesset will be given posts in Netanyahu's sixth administration. Almog Cohen, who remarked that “we have learned from Putin what leadership is”, will become a deputy economy minister. Yitzhak Wasserlauf, who has suggested that the Reform Movement has “brought enormous destruction to American Jewry”, will take the Negev and Galilee portfolio.
Amichai Eliyahu, who will head the Jewish Heritage Ministry, has periodically condemned the LGBTQ+ community. Zvika Fogel, the former head of Southern Command, will become chair of the Internal Security Committee. He famously made a distinction between Jewish and Arab stone throwers: “An Arab who throws a stone at a soldier should be shot in the head; a Jew who throws a stone at a soldier should be educated.”
Avi Maoz, the solitary representative of the Noam party component of “Religious Zionism” in the Knesset, opposes the inclusion of women in the IDF. He also wants the abolition of the Yeholam unit, a an advisory group for women's rights in the army, because it introduces “foreign” values into the IDF.
