IS THIS THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN ISRAELI POLITICS?

Without Ben-Gvir's support in the Knesset, the prime minister would lose his majority and his government would fall, possibly moving Netanyahu in the direction of prison. Netanyahu is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

- JOHN DOBSON

LONDON 'We got his car, 'W Wand too", and we'll get him shouted the bespectacled teenager holding the radiator badge from the Cadillac of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Weeks later, while getting into the same car, Rabin was assassinated at a rally in Tel Aviv by a Jewish extremist. It was November 1995 and ultraright-wing Israelis were still furious with Rabin for signing a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, two years earlier. A month before Rabin's assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu and other rightwing politicians, who stood against him had organised a rally in Jerusalem's Zion Square, during which the bespectacled teenager joined hundreds of protestors shouting "Death to Rabin".

Shortly after, the army chose to exempt the young activist from compulsory military service, considering him too dangerous.

The teenager calling for the death of Rabin now Israel's Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of Otzma Yehudit, an antiArab party which won six seats in the 2022 elections to the Knesset, Israel's parliament. Ben-Gvir is normally seen sitting in the chamber alongside fellow ultra-rightwinger Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's Minister of Finance and leader of the Religious Zionist Party. They both live in illegal settlements in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

Along with other far-right ultra-nationalist parties, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich hold fourteen seats in the Knesset, crucial for Prime Minister Netanyahu's hold on power.