After a difficult week in which the killings of six Israeli hostages by Hamas sparked protests across Israel, the country’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir headed to the beach.
In a suit despite the oppressive heat, the ultranationalist arrived on the shoreline of secular, liberal Tel Aviv earlier this month to be met with jeers from bathers. One young woman allegedly threw a handful of sand in his direction, after which the trouble began.
Police officers protecting Ben-Gvir arrested the woman, shackled her hands and legs, and kept her in prison overnight. She was charged with “attacking a public servant”, an offence that can carry a three-year jail sentence.
For many in Israel, the incident was the latest example of how the country’s police force has been transformed under Ben-Gvir’s command over the 20 months since his party joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Former senior police officials, legal analysts and anti-government activists say the 30,000-strong national force is being politicised in line with the agenda of an extreme ultranationalist at a time of high tensions resulting from the war with Hamas in Gaza.
They warn that the reshaping of the force by a man who proudly tells Palestinians that Jews are their “landlords” may have far-reaching ramifications for police conduct, the rule of law, and even Israeli democracy.
David Tzur, a former senior police chief, said: “This is what’s called an elephant in a china shop . . . They took a convicted criminal and put him into the holiest of holies of the law enforcement system. This is something that is unbelievable.”
Since Ben-Gvir took on oversight of the country’s police, the force has been accused of lax policing of settler violence in the occupied West Bank, of aggressive tactics against anti-government protesters, and of failing to halt far-right attacks on aid convoys to besieged Gaza. At the same time, Ben-Gvir has sought to unilaterally change long-standing rules governing Jerusalem’s most combustible holy place, the al-Aqsa mosque compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.
The 48-year-old rabble rouser, repeatedly convicted in the past on charges relating to anti-Arab activism, would until recent years have been viewed as an impossible candidate to take on responsibility for law enforcement.
As a teenage disciple of the late Jewish extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, Ben-Gvir first came into public view in 1995 when he broke an ornament off then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car.
“Just like we got to this symbol, we can get to Rabin,” Ben-Gvir said in a TV interview as he held up the Cadillac mascot. Weeks later, Rabin was shot dead by a far-right Jewish extremist opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Ben-Gvir, who lives in the Kiryat Arba settlement in the southern West Bank, previously kept a framed picture in his living room of Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 murdered more than two dozen Palestinian worshippers at the nearby Ibrahimi mosque.
In later years Ben-Gvir turned to the law, specialising in defending Jewish settlers suspected of attacking Palestinians. Israeli media turned to him for interviews, and his public profile grew, resulting in a successful run for parliament in 2021 as the head of the Jewish Power party.
Netanyahu, himself a rightwinger, promised publicly at the time that Ben-Gvir would not become a minister in his government. Yet, a year later, the long-serving premier needed Ben-Gvir and his party to garner enough support to form his current governing coalition.
The price of Ben-Gvir’s backing was the grandly renamed “national security” ministry — formerly just “internal security” — with expanded powers over the police.
Ben-Gvir, who campaigned on a “law and order” platform, has said his goal is to “increase governance and sovereignty” while strengthening police with bigger budgets.
Yet, according to police data made public by the Movement for Freedom of Information, overall crime has soared on his watch. In particular, violent crime within Arab-Israeli towns and villages has reached record highs, rising from 116 murders in 2022 to 244 in 2023, according to data seen by the FT. Almost 170 Arab-Israelis have been murdered so far in 2024.
The Israel police said that “addressing violence in the Israeli-Arab community remains a top priority” to which “substantial resources” have been allocated.
Yet, overall public trust in the police has cratered, polls show. Morale within the force has plummeted, and many mid-ranking and senior officers have resigned or are threatening to do so, according to interviews, media reports and internal communications seen by the Financial Times. Six deputy commissioners have left in the past two months alone.
“Ben-Gvir represents all that is undemocratic — bullying, violence, racism . . . So long as his plans and failures are allowed to continue and deepen, there will no longer be a ‘democratic’ police,” said one former senior police commander. “Police will begin targeting anti-government elements and minorities. You start with the Arabs, but it won’t end there.”
Anti-government activists have taken to calling the force “Ben-Gvir’s militia”.
The minister himself has demanded to act as a “supra-police commissioner” above the top commander, seeking involvement not only in broad policy but also in the specifics of operations and the use of force, said multiple former senior police officers.
The former officers said this contravened not only democratic norms but also Israeli law, which stipulates that the police commissioner must remain independent from political meddling. The Supreme Court has sought to uphold this independence after civil society groups appealed against Ben-Gvir’s extended powers.
Instead, according to the former police officers, Ben-Gvir has wielded influence through the back door.
“The crux of [a minister’s] power lies in building the force — in other words, appointments. That’s where his main power lies,” said Tzur.
Ben-Gvir has deployed that power widely, personally interviewing even mid-ranking commanders for promotion and directly calling district chiefs, said multiple people with knowledge of police operations.
“There is chaos inside the police, and he instils fear in the officers according to his own agenda,” said the former police commander. “He moulds the personalities who command the police, and for all the others it shows them where their loyalties should lie.”
Ben Gvir’s office and Israel’s national security ministry did not reply to repeated requests for comment.
Last month, Ben-Gvir appointed Danny Levy as police commissioner, a shock choice given that Levy had been a district commander for less than a year. He had, over the previous year, overseen the violent dispersal of weekly anti-government protests in Netanyahu’s home town of Caesarea.
“You’re the right person in the right place,” Ben-Gvir told Levy at his appointment ceremony. “Danny comes with a Zionist and Jewish agenda and he will lead the police according to the policy I set for him,” he added.
Tzur argued, however, that attempts to tar Levy as solely beholden to Ben-Gvir were unfair, calling it a “worthy appointment”. “Just because the person who appointed him is a criminal doesn’t invalidate every appointment. [But] the burden of proof is now on [Danny Levy],” Tzur said.
The outgoing police commissioner, Kobi Shabtai, issued a stark warning in July as his term ended. “The fight against the politicisation of the police and its deviation from the professional path is in full swing,” he said.
In Levy’s first week as commissioner in early September, some 125 demonstrators were detained nationally — amid mass protests calling for a deal to release hostages held in Gaza — compared with an average 85 per month in the 20 months before that, according to the Detainee Legal Support Front, a non-profit organisation.
One demonstrator in Tel Aviv, Nadav Gat, was detained this month while simply standing on the pavement, he told the FT. He was held overnight without an arrest report. “There was not even the appearance of professionalism,” he said.
At the same time, far-right activists, who are closely identified politically with Ben-Gvir and the West Bank settlement movement, for the first half of this year blocked aid convoys trying to reach war-torn Gaza, with minimal police intervention. No one was arrested.
An Israeli security source said there were suspicions within the military that police personnel had tipped off the groups on the movement of the convoys. Even the US administration demanded publicly that Israeli authorities do more to stop the attacks.
There are other instances of an apparent soft approach to the far right. In July, ultranationalist gangs broke into two Israeli military bases, in protest at the arrest of several reservists alleged to have tortured Palestinian detainees. As police mounted a lacklustre response, the Israeli military was forced to deploy infantry to protect one of the bases. None of the ultranationalists were arrested.
Several former officers said the worst police indifference was in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians have risen sharply, according to data from the UN and Israeli human rights non-profit organisations.
The head of the Shin Bet internal security agency, Ronen Bar, warned in a letter sent to the cabinet — but not to Ben-Gvir — last month that the increase was a result of “the weak hand of the police, and possibly even a sense of support to a certain extent”, according to Israeli media reports.
In response to specific questions from the FT, the Israeli police said it “operates as an apolitical institution dedicated to handling offences with impartiality and professionalism. Allegations suggesting that the police are influenced by political agendas distort the truth and undermine the rule of law.”
Yet, Yoav Segalovich, a former top police officer and former deputy internal security minister from the opposition Yesh Atid party, said the Israeli public was increasingly convinced that the police had become politicised under Ben-Gvir, a perception that, he said, fatally harmed trust.
“This is the biggest damage that can be caused in a democratic system,” Segalovich said. “You need to uphold the law . . . and [in the West Bank] the police simply isn’t present in the places where it needs to be.”
In Jerusalem, the al-Aqsa compound has been the scene of what multiple former and current Israeli officials, including from the police, said were perhaps Ben-Gvir’s most dangerous interventions. The hilltop site has sparked repeated Israeli-Palestinian violence, while for decades a “status quo” has been upheld in which Jews can visit but not pray. Police are central to maintaining order at the flashpoint site.
Yet, Ben-Gvir last month said at the site that he had unilaterally changed the “status quo” — a claim Netanyahu quickly rejected. Video emerged of a beaming Ben-Gvir walking among hundreds of Jewish worshippers prostrating themselves as police looked on passively.
“You have to understand the absurd [situation]: the responsibility to hold the weekly assessment about the Temple Mount . . . and to decide on the security arrangements are on the [national security] minister,” said Tzur.
“He decides on policy with regard to the Temple Mount and he is changing it. We see it . . . the fringe of the fringe have turned into the mainstream.”
Bar, the Shin Bet chief, wrote in his letter that such provocations by Ben-Gvir would “lead to much bloodshed and will change the face of the State of Israel beyond recognition”.
This month, Netanyahu again had to insist there was no change to the rules governing al-Aqsa, and demanded that ministers seek his approval before visiting. Segalovich said the damage was already done.
“Netanyahu allowed all of this,” he said. “If you put an agent of chaos as the minister in charge of the police then don’t be surprised by the results. This is Ben-Gvir’s goal: chaos and mayhem.”