How a Kahanist became a Bibi Henchman

Itamar Ben-Gvir is a remarkable example of how a political radical can climb from the margins to the center of power. As a young man, he was deeply involved in the extremist Kach movement and accumulated a record of arrests and convictions. The IDF considered him too politically extreme to enlist, and the Israel Bar Association initially blocked him from entering the legal profession because of his criminal record and conduct. Yet he eventually became a lawyer, a Knesset member, leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, and Israel's National Security Minister.

His rise is especially striking because institutions that once regarded him as too extreme to trust with a uniform or a law license eventually gave way to a political system that put him in charge of the police and national security. His recent rhetoric — including advocating the killing of 30–40 alleged terrorists a night and describing some people in Gaza as "not worthy of life" — shows that the radicalism of his youth has not simply disappeared; it has climbed the political ladder with him.

1. Why the IDF Wouldn't Take Him

Ben-Gvir was not a conscientious objector who refused to serve. Rather, the IDF refused to draft him.

As a teenager, he became deeply involved with Meir Kahane's Kach movement, an openly anti-Arab organization that was eventually outlawed in Israel. Ben-Gvir became a youth activist and spokesman for the movement. By the time he reached draft age in the mid-1990s, he had accumulated a substantial record of extremist political activism and repeated encounters with police.

The IDF apparently concluded that he was too politically extreme and potentially dangerous to entrust with military service and weapons. Contemporary reporting in 1997 says the army formally refused to enlist him, and Ben-Gvir himself complained that he was being denied service because of his political views.

This wasn't simply an ordinary medical exemption. His political and security background was the issue.

There's a particularly important historical context: Kach had been banned after Baruch Goldstein, a Kach supporter, massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994. Ben-Gvir was a Kach youth activist during this period.

In fact, a 1994 UN report records that the 18-year-old Ben-Gvir was already being questioned by Israeli police in connection with Kach activities and was temporarily barred by an IDF order from entering the West Bank.

So the irony is fairly striking: the Israeli military — an institution generally associated with hard-line national security — considered the young Ben-Gvir too extreme to put in uniform.

2. Why He Initially Couldn't Take the Bar Exam

This is slightly different.

Ben-Gvir studied law and completed his legal education, but the Israel Bar Association initially prevented him from qualifying for the bar examination and licensing process because of his criminal record and extremist activities.

His record wasn't merely political speech. By this point he had accumulated numerous arrests and convictions involving things such as:

• incitement to racism
• supporting a terrorist organization
• rioting
• interference with police
• property offenses

A later summary of his career notes that the Bar Association blocked him because of his criminal record. He challenged the decision.

And there's an interesting second chapter: he eventually won his legal battle and became a lawyer.

The significance is that the Bar Association wasn't saying, "We don't like your politics, therefore you can't be a lawyer." Its argument centered on whether someone with his criminal record and conduct was fit to enter the profession.

The Bigger Picture

Two of Israel's own institutions — its military and its legal establishment — independently concluded, at different points in his youth, that Ben-Gvir was unfit to be trusted with responsibility. Decades later, the political system handed him authority over the very domains those institutions had once shielded from him: the police, national security, and the machinery of law and order.

That arc — from a teenager barred from the West Bank and turned away by the army, to the man now setting policy for Israel's security forces — is the throughline of his career. Understanding how that happened says as much about the evolution of Israeli politics as it does about the man himself.